Last Car to Elysian Fields — James Lee Burke

A rainy late-summer night finds Robicheaux in a New Orleans bar, about to confront the man who may have savagely assaulted his friend, Father Jimmy Dolan, a Catholic priest who's always at the centre of controversy. But things in a Burke novel are rarely what they seem, and soon Robicheaux is back in New Iberia, probing a car crash that killed three teenage girls. A grief-crazed father and a maniacal, complex assassin are just a few of the characters Robicheaux meets as he is drawn deeper into a viper's nest of sordid secrets and escalating violence that sets him up for a confrontation that echoes down the lonely corridors of his own unresolved past.