James Lee Burke's reputation as a writer of hard-boiled detective fiction was solidified when Black Cherry Blues (1989), his third novel about retired New Orleans police officer Dave Robicheaux, won an Edgar Award as the best crime novel of 1989. Even though Burke had been writing and publishing novels for more than twenty years before he created Robicheaux, he did not view his entry into the field of hard-boiled fiction as a departure. Looking back on his career, in a 1995 interview with Rick Schultz, Burke maintained, "I've always written about people who have no voice. That's never changed in my writing." In a 1996 interview with Steven Womack, Burke commented, "I never thought of my books as essentially changing directions. The themes have always remained the same. I've always written about the same people, the same situations. . . . The series and the earlier works are one story." Burke, though, has also stretched...