In Book 2 of the Dave Robicheaux series, our hero has made immense changes in his life. He's married to Annie, the social worker whom he met in The Neon Rain. He's resigned from the New Orleans Police Department homicide division, cut off all ties with his former partner Clete Purcel, and has moved to New Iberia, Louisiana to open a bait-and-boat shop on the bayou. A recovering alcoholic, he is still doing his best to attend AA meetings and follow the Twelve Steps.

One morning, he and Annie are fishing in the Gulf when a small, two-engine plane crashes into the choppy salt waters right in front of them. Annie radios for help while Dave dives with his scuba gear to rescue the passengers. He finds four dead bodies and one little girl who clings to life, having been lifted into an air-pocket by her mother.

The girl and her mother are obviously Central-American refugees being flown into this country illegally. Dave pulls the little girl up to the surface. He and Annie report the incident, but later it comes out in the news that only three people were involved in the plane crash. Dave tentatively investigates through contacts at the local sheriff's department. The body of the fourth man has been spirited away in what seems like a government cover-up.

He and Annie have bigger things to handle: their unofficial adoption of the five year-old whom Dave impulsively names Alafair after his mother. (Interestingly enough, James Lee Burke's own daughter, also a mystery novelist, is named Alafair.)

Alafair speaks only Spanish but is able to tell Dave, through a Cuban acquaintance he finds to translate, about some of the atrocities perpetrated by the contras in her village. Dave takes little Alafair to the Catholic church where he struggles to communicate with her in French, which contains words similar to Spanish. He coaxes her to light a candle for her dead mother. Soon, the resilient child adjusts to life with him and Annie that contains unheard-of delights like ice-cream, fishing, and flying her first kite.

But Dave can never let a mystery go. He examines the shirt of the missing dead guy from the plane crash. A swizzle-stick in the guy's pocket leads Dave to a bar in New Orleans where he asks questions of a skittish stripper named Robin and an obnoxious bartender named Jerry.

This in turn causes a sinister white guy to visit Dave in New Iberia, accompanied by a black psychopath who used to be one of the tonton macoute (secret police) down in Haiti. The white guy threatens Dave while the black guy beats him to a pulp. Dave wakes up later in the hospital where he was taken by Batist, his employee from the bait-and-boat shop who found him lying unconscious in the weeds.

(Batist is an especially vivid character who shows up in most of the Robicheaux books: a no-nonsense black man, older than Dave, who speaks a peculiar type of Cajun-flavored English. Batist is illiterate and he believes in the gris-gris, but he can also be counted upon to point out to Dave, sometimes with barely controlled impatience, exactly what needs to be done in a crisis.)

Of course Dave doesn't suffer threats and assault lightly. He redoubles his efforts to track down the missing dead guy. Then, when a terrible tragedy befalls him, he takes a job as a detective with the local sheriff's department in order to give himself the extended powers of law enforcement with which to pursue his investigation – a quest that threatens to turn into a personal vendetta.

Heaven's Prisoners, Book 2 in the Robicheaux series, is an absorbing novel (that was also made into a movie starring a very unlikely choice to play Robicheaux: Alec Baldwin). It is available on Amazon through this link: Heaven's Prisoners