The novel opens with a nightmare Dave is having about Annie from the last book. He wakes in a motel room in Baton Rouge where he's gone to pick up some equipment for his bait-and-boat shop. It's still a few hours away from daybreak. He knows he can't sleep. So he gets dressed and goes over to a nearby all-night café that's part of a roadhouse. Some people are still drinking in the bar.

One man recognizes Dave and comes over, exclaiming in astonishment. It's Dixie Lee Pugh, Dave's old college roommate from Southwestern Louisiana State Institute in 1956. Dixie Lee started out as a "peckerwood" kid with an accent more Mississippi than Louisiana, raised in a strict-Baptist, cotton-and-pecan orchard town. Soaking up music at his church, he somehow evolved into a white blues singer. After flunking out of college in 1956, Dixie Lee headed to Memphis, Tennessee where he became as big a star as Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis … at least for awhile.

Then the bad luck took hold: several failed marriages, the death of one of his children in a fire, and a DWI/hit-and-run accident that landed Dixie Lee in prison in Huntsville, Texas. His music career never recovered after that, and now he's working as a lease-man for an oil company Star Drilling that sends him up and down between Louisiana and Montana, "anyplace there's oil and coal."

He and Dave marvel at how their lives have turned out, shake hands, and go their separate ways. Dave offers up a prayer for Dixie Lee, assuming he'll never see him again. He returns to New Iberia where his biggest problem is getting 6 year-old Alafair, his adopted Salvadoran daughter, enrolled in first grade.

Little Alafair spends a lot of time in the care of Batist and Clarice, the older black couple who work for Dave at the bait shop. As Alafair learns English, Dave tries in vain to keep her from picking up their strong Cajun articulation, which runs something like this (page 11): "For how come you burn them leafs under my window, you?" and "While I was driving your truck, me, somebody pass a nail under the wheel and give it a big flat." (Burke is a master at replicating the beautiful rhythms of both Southern black speech and Cajun-influenced English. You can literally hear these voices come to life as you read the dialogue.)

But then Dixie Lee Pugh shows up, wanting advice. He rents a boat from Dave and they go out on the bayou together and pretend to fish while Dixie Lee talks. Apparently Dixie Lee and two other lease-men were working up in Montana and running into problems with wilderness areas and the Blackfeet Indian reservation. After six weeks of negotiation, the lease-men returned to their hotel for a wild party at which Dixie Lee overheard his two co-workers Vidrine and Mapes talk about committing two murders. Now Dixie Lee is scared because these men know he overheard them, and he wants Dave to help him investigate.

Dave refuses. But things have a way of getting out of hand. A few days later, the men try to murder Dixie Lee while he's in the countryside with a date. They end up killing the girl, and putting Dixie Lee in the hospital. Then a stern Drug Enforcement Administration man named Nygurski phones Dave, wanting information about Dixie Lee. It turns out that Dixie Lee is involved in complicated leasing deals with a mobster named Sal Dio whom the DEA has been hot to put away for years. The conversation with the DEA agent convinces Dave that he should go to the local sheriff's department and make a full report about these two men Vidrine and Mapes. This in turn brings Dave to their attention.

In order to intimidate him, Vidrine and Mapes leave a note in Dave's mailbox (along with a photograph of some evil work they did in Vietnam), threatening little Alafair. This is of course the most inflammatory thing possible to do to Dave who suffers both massive guilt over the events in the previous book, and a half-conscious death-wish. Dave takes a boat chain and tracks Vidrine and Mapes down to a hotel room where he retaliates in a scene rendered all the more effective because it's left to the reader's imagination. But after Dave leaves the two men, Mapes kills Vidrine and then disappears, leaving Dave conveniently framed for murder in the first degree. This crime, in Louisiana, could easily put Dave on death-row in Angola prison.

The rest of the book follows Dave, out on bail and with little Alafair in tow, as he goes to Montana to investigate Dixie Lee's mob connections and clear his name. Who does he find there, working as a bodyguard to mobster Sal Dio? It's wild-man Clete Purcel, Dave's partner when they worked homicide for the New Orleans Police Department. After the events of The Neon Rain, Clete had to flee to Central America to avoid a murder charge. Now the years of working for the mobsters whom he still despises have taken a toll on Clete's body and soul.

Dave and Clete forgive each other late in the book in an extraordinary scene that made me burst out laughing even while it touched my heart. The scene is a transcendent moment in a nearly-perfect book from a writer at the top of his game. Black Cherry Blues, which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best mystery, is available on Amazon through this link: Black Cherry Blues: A Dave Robicheaux Novel