What made me want to read this book was hearing that it was set in New Orleans during and after Hurricane Katrina.  This book is part of Burke’s series of Dave Robicheaux novels of which there have been 18 (this is number 16) published between 1987 and 2010.  Robicheaux, the main character, is a cop in New Iberia, Louisiana.  When Katrina strikes, New Orleans Police Department resources are stretched thin and Dave must take on some of the case load.  From what I gathered of Dave’s character he is a recovering alcoholic and Vietnam veteran.  At the beginning of the book we are introduced to a junkie priest living with a Mexican prostitute. He’s a good priest and wants to help the poor and downtrodden, he just has a drug problem.  He and the prostitute move to the Lower 9th Ward right before Katrina hits.  The other character we are introduced to is Otis Baylor.  Otis lives in the wealthier Garden District of New Orleans. He is an insurance adjuster and lives with his wife Melanie and his daughter Thelma.  The family has deep-rooted problems, however, in that Thelma was raped by a bunch of thugs.  Her date for the prom had run out of gas in a bad neighborhood and left her alone in the car. A group of black thugs subsequently raped her. The cops hadn’t been able to find the rapists, Thelma was scarred for life, and Otis was left feeling helpless but also wanting revenge.

Katrina hits and the Lower 9th is flooded because  the shoddy construction of the levies gives way.  Burke does a good job of representing the anger of the people at the corrupt government and Corps of Engineers who knew that the levy system was no good but did nothing to fix it.  After Katrina came the looters, and what do you know, the black thugs who raped Thelma are taking part in the looting right on Otis’ street. Thelma looks out the window and instantly recognizes them as the men who raped her. Two of the thugs, Bertrand and Eddie Melanchon decide to loot this one house at the end of Otis’ street. Within the walls they find a ton of cash, cocaine, and blood diamonds. They’ve hit the motherlode! Except, and this cracked me up, the house they hit was of a notorious Mob guy Sidney Kovic. As they are escaping in their motor boat down the alley way, their boat runs out of gas.  Eddie goes to Otis’ garage to steal some gas from a gas can and when he gets back to the boat, a shot is fired from the house severely injuring him and killing two of his other buddies on the boat.  Bertrand is still OK.

Here is where Dave and his friend Cletus Purcell get involved. Cletus is a hilarious character. He’s a former cop who is now a bondsman who does whatever he can (legal or illegal) to capture guys who’ve jumped bail.  No one at the police station feels comfortable when he is around, but he is a close friend to Dave.  They start investigating the shooting behind Otis Baylor’s house and try to find the location of the stolen blood diamonds.  Sidney Kovic and his men are doing they’re own searching for these thugs and end up killing every one but Bertrand.  There is also a new guy in town Ronald Bledsoe who is very creepy and immediately gets on Dave’s bad side by harassing his daughter, Alafair.  Bledsoe claims to be a private investigator, but Dave has a strong feeling he is one of Kovic’s men.  The whole second half of the book pursues the stories of who shot the thugs outside of Baylor’s house, where are the blood diamonds, and who is Ronald Bledsoe and what connection does he have with the cases?

The book was really entertaining, especially the first half.  I am definitely going to check out more books from this series. I listened to the audio book from Audible.com and the reader Will Patton did an excellent job.  The slight Cajun accent was absolutely perfect for this book.  He also did other voices really well such as Cletus Purcell and the swarmy, creepy Ronald Bledsoe.

Tina Evans is newly divorced from her husband. Their marriage disintegrated shortly after their son, Danny, died in a tragic bus accident. He was only twelve years old.

Now, about a year later, Tina lives alone in the house that they once shared. She still works at the same casino in Vegas that she always has, except now, instead of a dancer, she is the director of a show that she hopes will be an amazing success. All of her time, efforts, and thoughts are focused on this show. She has plans for more shows after this one ends. This might be Tina’s way of dealing with her grief. At the start of the book, she is convinced that she sees Danny sitting in a car in the parking lot. Her hopes crash when she realizes that the boy she is looking at is not her son, after all.

At first, I thought I was reading a ghost story. Tina has left Danny’s room exactly as it was the day he died. She has a housekeeper who dusts and cleans it, but otherwise it has been untouched. One day, she comes into the room and notices that the chalkboard easel has been knocked over. As she picks it up, she sees that the words “NOT DEAD” have been written on it.

There is an excellent scene where the housekeeper experiences what appears to be poltergeist activity when she is trying to clean Danny’s room. The temperature drops. Ice forms on the window, and flat surfaces of the room. Model airplanes spin, and poster rip themselves into pieces while they are still attached to the wall.

The housekeeper is a no-nonsense woman. Koontz takes the time to fully describe her and her life, and I really enjoyed the short story about the housekeeper. She remains undaunted by the freaky events in Danny’s room. Here is my favorite paragraph from this book:

“But she didn’t believe in ghosts. There were no such things. She believed in death and taxes, in the inevitability of slot-machine jackpots, in all-you-can-eat casino buffets for $5.95 per person, in the Lord God Almighty, in the truth of alien abductions and Big Foot, but she didn’t believe in ghosts.”

Tina at first, believes that her husband is the one who has been breaking in, and writing on the chalkboard in Danny’s room, in an effort to mess with her head. Later, she changes her mind, and is concerned that a stalker is following her. She tells her concerns to a man she recently met, and has started to date, named Elliot, who just so happens to be a lawyer. Suddenly, the ghost story turns into a full blown thriller. There are secrets, explosions, and hastily made escape plans.

I was kind of disappointed when I realized this wasn’t a ghost story. I wasn’t prepared to be reading a thriller, all of a sudden. Later, the book gets a science fiction flavor, and then it became interesting again. The ending answers the main questions that were posed at the beginning of the story, which worked pretty well. However, I was still left wanting to know what happened next. I would have liked to read the sequel, except I don’t think a sequel to this book ever got written. (At least, I am not aware of it).

I didn’t love this book, but I did enjoy it. It kind of jumped around with genre, and I didn’t feel like it completely pulled off each genre equally well. However, there were some real gems within these pages. I really enjoyed the mini story about the housekeeper. The book was written in 1981, and I found the scenes describing the computers the characters were using, (with the blinking cursors, and dot matrix printers) to be nostalgically entertaining. It’s a quick read, and there is a lot going on at the same time. But, it just didn’t grab me in the way that a good ghost story would have.