Detective Dave Robicheaux, like other hardboiled heroes before him, walks a fine line between the world of ordinary people who he seeks to protect and the world of criminals which he seeks to protect it from.

A sober alcoholic, the same self-destructive tendencies that drove his drinking seem often to influence his behavior on the job and in his family life. He believes in absolutes, but remains steadfastly unwilling to sacrifice any individual—even a hardened criminal—on the altar of idealism. He seeks refuge in his family, in his past, and in the bayous where he grew up, but the fallen nature of his world follows him into even those places most sacred to him. He knows the nature of the real world, having learned it first in the jungles of Vietnam and later on the streets of New Orleans, in the way that one...