First, I've got to say this is probably the best title I've ever seen for a mystery novel. The story opens with Dave Robicheaux, a detective with the New Iberia-Louisiana sheriff's department, heading home. He's tired and sick at heart because he's spent all day looking for a missing 19 year-old before finding her mutilated body in a coulee (an arroyo or ditch).

Suddenly he sees a lavender Cadillac weaving all over the road. Sighing, he puts his police light on the roof of his truck, and pulls over the driver. Since there's a movie getting filmed in town, Dave is not surprised to find movie star Elrod Sykes driving.

Elrod is drunk. His girlfriend, famous actress Kelly Drummond, sits in the passenger seat. She looks queasy after almost certainly having swallowed the remains of a marijuana joint. Dave stands at Elrod's window, wearily explaining how he's going to take Elrod down to the city jail. A recovering alcoholic himself, he tries to keep his face clear of Elrod's 100-proof breath. Elrod expresses good-natured remorse and wonders if he might just fix everything with a contribution to Mothers Against Drunk Driving "or something like that."

Dave responds (on page 4), "Mr. Sykes, you're under arrest. You can remain silent if you wish, or if you wish to speak, anything you say can be used against you … As a long-time fan of your work, I recommend that you not say anything else. Particularly about contributions."

Thus starts a vivid installment in the Dave Robicheaux series. It turns out that Elrod is psychic. While in New Iberia filming a movie about the War Between the States, he's had visions of Confederate soldiers who have the wounded and half-starved look of a rifle company that has spent way too long out in the field. He mentions this to Dave who shrugs off what he thinks are alcoholic ramblings.

But then Elrod, wanting to avoid a drunk-driving arrest, offers information about a dead body. Apparently four days ago while the movie crew was filming in a swamp, Elrod stumbled across the body of a black man wrapped in a chain. He didn't report it then because his hard-nosed director didn't want police disrupting their work. Dave lets Elrod off the hook after Elrod promises to show him the body in the morning.

The dead body connects with a harrowing incident in Dave's own past. In 1957, he happened to witness two white men in a remote bayou chase down and shoot a black man whom they'd wrapped in chains. Afterwards, Dave tried and failed to get the all-white local law enforcement to investigate this murder. He had to give up, but he never forgot it. Now a drunken psychic actor has given him the means to re-open the case and put old demons to rest.

But then the mutilated body of another young woman gets found. Now the isolated murder that Dave investigated earlier looks like the work of a serial killer. Dave gets a new partner in the case: FBI agent Rosie Gomez who may be so short that she can barely see over the steering wheel of her car, but whose no-nonsense, standup attitude compliments his own obsession with solving the case.

So we have two murder investigations: the black man slain in 1957, and the girls getting slaughtered in the present-day by a serial killer. The fact that the murdered girls are prostitutes prompts Dave to lean hard on local mobster "Baby-Feet" Balboni for information. It turns out that Balboni is investing in Elrod Sykes's movie. Since the movie stands to pump millions into the local economy, the bigwigs of New Iberia don't want anyone hassling Balboni. So they start sharpening their knives for Dave, waiting for him to make a misstep so that they can take away his job and ruin his reputation.

Dave has a strange intuition that the 1957 case and the present-day serial killer case connect. Speaking of intuition, he himself starts to have detailed visions, and then long surrealistic conversations with Confederate general John Bell Hood. Some of this happens when mobsters spike his Dr. Pepper with LSD. But other encounters with General Hood occur spontaneously, and the locals begin gleefully to cast doubt upon Dave's sanity.

Some readers might be put off by the ambiguity surrounding General Hood. He speaks as if he is one part of Dave's mind offering counsel to the other. On the other hand, Alafair and her friend also see the general. Once Hood sits with Dave in some baseball bleachers; afterwards, the place where Hood sat is warm and free of raindrops. Also, Dave himself seems to end up in one of Alafair's history books, posing in a photograph with General Hood and his troops. I didn't mind any of this. In fact, I found it extremely entertaining.

Most of the familiar characters from the Robicheaux series put in an appearance: adopted daughter Alafair (now 11 years old), wife Bootsie, and Batist the stalwart black employee at the bait shop. Alas, no sign of wild-man Clete Purcel, Dave's former partner from the New Orleans Police Department homicide division. But Elrod turns out to be a vivid, multi-layered, and even endearing character: good-natured, sensitive, charming, exasperating, and a Southern boy himself. He is one of the few people whom Robicheaux ever meets on a case who turns out to be an innocent soul.

In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (Dave Robicheaux Book 6) is available on Amazon through this link: In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead