The mutilated corpse of a young woman is found, stuffed into a metal barrel. Cherry LeBlanc was only nineteen when she was killed and dumped and it is detective Dave Robicheaux's job to solve her murder. And a movie star, in town to make a movie, also discovers the bones of a man while out boating. Dave, viewing the remains of the dead man, realizes he was a witness to the man's murder back in 1957, when Dave was a college boy.
The movie star, Elrod, sometimes has mystical experiences and he shares with Dave his vision of a Confederate general and a warning the general wanted Elrod to give Dave. Of course, Dave dismisses Elrod's warnings until Elrod tells him something that no one, besides Dave himself, could possibly know.
Before much longer, the Confederate general starts appearing to Dave too and gives him oblique advice that Dave doesn't know how to process. Dave tries to tell himself it's just his mind working through things but even his young daughter has seen the dead general though she doesn't realize he is not real.
So this Confederate stuff is woven all through the story and becomes part of Dave's struggle to bring justice to the two victims, Cherry LeBlanc and the man who was murdered back in 1957.
The plots of a Dave Robicheaux novel are always rather tangled and hard (for me at least) to follow. But the ghost general sure added to the tangle, bringing an element of the supernatural that I didn't expect from a detective story. I really enjoyed his appearances, thought they added a lot to the story.
Here is a review by Kirkus.
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