Detective Dave Robicheaux returns in another adventure--only this time, he travels from New Iberia Parish to the wilds of Montana to solve the mysterious murder of a University of Montana coed and her boyfriend.

When Hackberry Holland became sheriff of a tiny Texas town near the Mexican border, he'd hoped to leave certain things behind: his checkered reputation, his haunted dreams, and his obsessive memories of the good life with his late wife, Rie. But the discovery of the bodies of nine illegal aliens, machine-gunned to death and buried in a shallow grave behind a church, soon makes it clear that he won't escape so easily.

"On his way to visit an inmate at a Texas prison who has promised him information, Detective Dave Robicheaux stops off at an amusement park to watch a teenaged Elvis-like rock-and-roller from his hometown of New Iberia named Johnny Shondell playing to a crowd of swooming young girls. One of them is another New Iberia teenager named Isolde Balangie. The Shondell and Balangie families are longtime rivals in the New Iberia criminal underworld. Yet Johnny...