The first book in the Dave Robicheaux series opens at night in the mid-1980s. A light rain falls over the infamous Angola state penitentiary in Louisiana. College kids gather outside the gate, carrying signs that denounce the death penalty. An opposing group of frat boys wave signs that mock them.

Dave Robicheaux, a lieutenant in the New Orleans Police Department approaches the guard who finds his name on a clipboard. Dave is here to see low-level mobster Johnny Massina in the last three hours before the guy fries in the electric chair. Massina says he has important information: it turns out that "the Colombians" are contracting a hit on Dave. This puzzles Dave because he works homicide not narcotics, and is therefore no threat to their drug trade.

Back at work the next day, Dave tells everything to his partner Cletus Purcel. They sit with their desks crowded together in a building that has an evil history (page 11): " … it had been a cotton warehouse, and before the Civil War slaves had been kept in the basement and led up the stairs into a dirt ring that served both as an auction arena and a cockfighting pit."

Clete also wonders why the Colombians would want to kill Dave. He then gives Dave a message from the coroner of Cataouatche parish: no autopsy was performed on "that colored girl" because the sheriff didn't request one, and therefore her death has been called a drowning.

Disturbed, Dave remembers two weeks ago when fishing in the bayou in the remote parish. He found the half-submerged body of a young black woman with a dime tied around her ankle to ward off the gris-gris, and track-marks on her arms. At the time, Dave called the sheriff's department, then stood grimly over the crime scene as wise-cracking deputies loaded her body into an ambulance. Now he finds out that the poor girl isn't important enough to warrant a murder investigation.

He doesn't know it, but the slain black girl is his connection between himself and the Colombians who want to kill him. Her murder investigation drags him into a nightmarish plot involving the Mafia, Colombia drug-lords, and even paramilitary types involved with the contras against the Sandinistas. On the positive side, Dave meets an innocent, yet brave, social-worker named Annie who starts a relationship with him.

The Neon Rain is the first book in the highly-acclaimed Dave Robicheaux series, and it showcases three elements that make the series so noteworthy. First, as I've alluded to above, there is the powerful sense of time and place.

This isn't just the American South. This is James Lee Burke's Louisiana, made up of what he calls the "peckerwood" northern territory around Shreveport (pinewoods, illiterate white folk, fundamentalist churches, and the Ku Klux Klan); and the French-Catholic Acadian lands bordering the Gulf and characterized by the "pagan" decadence of New Orleans. So you've got the peckerwoods and the pagans, all haunted by the War Between the States and the legacy of slavery.

Second, there are the characters. Dave Robicheaux, a Cajun descendent of the French Catholics, is a man haunted by his Vietnam experience in 1965, and the death of his larger-than-life illiterate father who taught him honor, generosity, and compassion before perishing in an oil-rig accident. His homicide partner Cletus Purcel is Irish, also a Vietnam veteran, and equally intelligent if twice as cynical as Dave.

Both men, each in his late-forties, are alcoholics, but handle it in different ways. Dave hangs on by his fingernails to the twelve-steps of AA, and Clete floors it knowingly down that highway to alcoholic hell, not really caring that his bill will come due. Clete is the kind of out-of-control cop who picks fights with citizens and bursts into brothels and juke joints to torture confessions out of criminals. He's both an entertaining and deeply sinister character who says and does things that appall Dave who then tries not to acknowledge the convenience of Clete's results.

Third is the sense of impending chaos in the narrative. Anything could happen at any time in the Robicheaux universe, and you only know that it's going to be sudden and violent. This is a place of tropical storms that hover over the Gulf and then flatten the landscape. Racial tensions flare into knife fights and shootings. Characters tremble on the verge of psychotic breakdowns. Organized crime leads to drug-fueled atrocities that feed back into the profits of the mobsters.

As a reader, a distant part of your mind marvels at this hellish and flamboyant world even while you're accepting that a cop takes ten thousand dollars payment from a mobster to assassinate another criminal because (page 327), "…he was garbage and you know it. The credit union wouldn't give me another loan, I'm still paying alimony … I could have handled it, but I had some complications with a girl. She said she was a month late, and she stiffed me for a grand to get lost."

Was there ever such a fine line between cops and criminals in a mystery series? The violence in this novel is considerable, but so is the beauty of the writing. The Neon Rain is available on Amazon through this link: The Neon Rain: A Dave Robicheaux Novel