Flynn's ghost is revived when his daughter Megan comes to New Iberia to see Dave Robicheaux. Megan, world-famous for her photographs of the world's oppressed and brutalized, wants Dave to look into the claims of a small-time thief named Willie "Cool Breeze" Broussard. Cool Breeze says he's being abused by the jailer; the jailer calls the claim nonsense. Dave is at first reluctant to get involved, but in the end decides to check things out. And, as usual, stirs up more than he had intended to.

Questions about Cool Breeze lead backwards in time to Jack Flynn's death and sideways in space, to the Terrebonne place in St. Mary's, where Jack's son Cisco is making a movie with some very unsavory characters. Dave pursues everything, wherever it leads, because that's who Dave is.

Sunset Limited is not the most satisfactory of James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux mysteries. One of the great pleasures of the series has been its depth of layering, its powerful sense of person and place. Out of this comes a detective rooted in a particular world, a world you can nearly smell and taste. In Sunset Limited, however, that strong sense of place is diluted, though the poetry of James Lee Burke's prose is as heady as ever.

I believe the other reason Sunset Limited is a less satisfying read is the ending. I finished the book without a clear idea of what had been going on, and with a sense that at least some malefactors had escaped justice, while others had received harder blows than they deserved. For some mystery readers, that lack of moral order may be a violation of the "rules" of mystery writing.

So why am I recommending Sunset Limited? Two reasons, essentially. First, the quality of James Lee Burke's writing makes his novels a pleasure to read. No character is too minor to be made as real as possible, and his descriptions put you in Louisiana:

"Just before the sun broke above the Gulf's rim, the wind, which had blown the waves with ropes of foam all night, suddenly died and the sky became as white and brightly grained as polished bone, as though all color had been bled out o f the air, and the gulls that had swooped and glided over my wake lifted into the haze and the swells flattened into an undulating sheet of liquid tin dimpled by the leathery backs of stingrays."

Second, the uncertainty and loose ends at the finish felt deliberate, a choice made to reflect the messiness of life. If this was the least satisfying of the Dave Robicheaux mysteries, it might well be the most haunting.

--Katy Cooper