Here, the issues particularly revolve around the relationship of law and justice, and the ethics of vigilantism. Like all serious fiction, this novel is fundamentally concerned with moral issues, the answers to which aren’t obvious and force readers to think. (The authorities are certain he’s guilty –but is he?) Soon after, the community begins to be terrorized by a serial rapist.

As the book opens, we learn that one Marcus Renard has just been set free on a technicality after being arrested by the sheriff’s office for the hideously savage rape and murder of a prominent local businesswoman. (Hoag herself was born in Iowa and lives in Florida but she’s clearly very familiar with this area, and has frequently set her fiction here.) The plot is very taut, respecting all of Aristotle’s classical unities it unfolds over a period of about two weeks leading up to Mardi Gras and Ash Wednesday (a season which is a big deal in heavily Catholic south Louisiana) mostly in and around the small town of Bayou Breaux, population around 7,000. So I could visualize the scenery, hear the accents and dialect, and appreciate the immersive evocation of place and culture that Hoag conjures, with references to things like zydeco music. (The book is also counted as the opener of the Broussard and Fourcade series, which is apparently more connected but it has a resolution to the mysteries involved in this volume, while leaving things open for new ones.)īack in the late 80s, I visited the rural Cajun country of south Louisiana, where this book is set. Our protagonists are sheriff’s deputies Nick Fourcade, a detective, and Annie Broussard, a uniformed deputy who’d like to be a detective.

However, that nominal “series” is apparently very loosely connected, only by having main or other characters from the fictional Doucet clan and a Doucet appears in this novel, though not as the protagonist. This is officially characterized (though not in the cover copy) as the fourth book of the author’s Doucet series.

A thin dark line by tami hoag