The Neon Rain

Grimey. Captures life in the seventies New Orleans quite well, complete with the corruption and racial contempt. At times this doens't match the occasionally flowery language.

Dave Robicheaux is a black Leutenant in the New orleans police. He mostly enjoys his joba dn is realistic enough to know since his first wife left him, that it is a demanding calling. He's also been ry for the last few years. Just about all the cliche's in one hit for a policeman. During a rare weekend off fishing, he discovers a body floating in the weeds - a young formerly pretty black girl. The local force quickly chalk it up as another druggie drowning, but Dave digs a little deeper and stirs up the interest of the local arms dealers. Despite his friends and relations (brother) with the mob contacts, these characters have little compunction about casual violence and use almost any means to keep their dirty game going. Dave isn't impressed, and sets out to single handedly clean up New Orleans. Fortunetly his Capatin is a decent guy who stands by him.

I never really enagaged with this. New Orleans is always a somewhat exotic location and there are a lot of assumptions about local culture that just don't transfer to this side of the pond. The grimy atmosphere remenisicent of Marlow doesn't help either. Some longer tracts of descriptive langaugae -whilst being good for enlightning the mood, don't help the plot along, and I frequently forgot who was betraying whom and why, let aone what the invented motives of the bad guys were supposed to be. There was some involvment with US foreign policy in the South Americas at the time, but that's not just ancient history but foreign history and to me, so I didn't follow what was happening. Dave is hardly charasmatic (cf Reacher to whom he's often compared), but the supporting cast were even worse, the girlfriend particularly unbelivable.

I guess this is one for the locals. If you were around at the time, and or knwo the coity and it's history then this was probably (assuming hte author got his facts more or less straight) and interestingrea with local colour (much like Stuart McBride). It I'm not and so - like Elmore Leonard - I'll pass on this series. ( )

Well written, fairly interesting characters and nice atmosphere. The story didn't totally make sense to me and it was full of gratuitous violence. As in; every couple pages has some breathless description of some horrific event in pornographic detail, much of it having nothing to do with the story, but simply a flashback or story one of the characters heard from a friend, etc.

I haven't read anything else by him, but he's obviously talented and the writing quality and characters kept me fairly entertained. He has a great eye for detail and setting a scene. ( )

It's the first title in the Dave Robicheaux series and I really loved the viscous, evocative imagery, the realistically portrayed characters and, the uncertainty as to how the whole of the situation and the characters' fates will be dispositioned until the very end. The narrator sounds a wee bit too long in the tooth to be the protag; On the other hand, his character delineation and cadence of the text is masterful. The only thing about the novel that may trouble some is that the violence, while it emerges from the narrative and chokes you like a silk garrote, is also truly graphic and horrific in a Dali-esque way. It entrances and repels at the same time. ( )

Davve Robicheaux is a New Orleans homicide cop. When he fishes a dead prostitute out of a near by bayou, he determines to find out who killed her and why, despite the fact no one else seems to care.

Lots of atmosphere, very much true to New Orleans and its environs, Dave is gritty and not quite straight much like his city. He’s determined and stubborn and willing to do what he thinks needs to be done, even if it isn’t legal.

This was an audio version of the book, and I especially liked the narrator. He ddin’t overdo the accent, as so many people do for southern stories. ( )

The Neon Rain, James Lee Burke’s introduction of Cajun cop Dave Robicheaux to crime fiction readers is even better than I remembered it to be. It has been more than twenty years since I first read this first one, but Dave Robicheaux books have been a regular part of my reading life ever since that first exposure to Dave’s world. There are now nineteen books in the series (I hope Burke is hard at work on number twenty), and I have read all but the latest of them almost as soon as they were published. I was immediately and permanently hooked, and now I remember why.

The plot of The Neon Rain is rather straightforward: a New Orleans detective learns from a death row inmate that someone has placed a contract on his life and starts nosing around to see if there is anything to the rumor. In the process of trying to pin names and motives to the potential hit, our detective inadvertently makes some powerful people – on both sides of the law – very nervous. Lt. Robicheaux, it seems, has almost as many enemies within the New Orleans P.D. as he does outside it. He also has a huge drinking problem and a strong commitment to making the bad guys pay for their crimes, both of which are about to make his life hell.

The real strength of the Dave Robicheaux series is Burke’s talent for creating characters his readers want to know more about. They are not always likeable, but they are always interesting. Even some of the characters we do like, especially Robicheaux and his longtime partner Clete Purcell, are flawed almost beyond redemption. But amidst all the chaos and ugliness, Dave Robicheaux creates a family, stays in love with his wife, raises the little girl he plucked from the bottom of a lake, and tries to keep his best friend from self-destructing. Oh, and along the way, he solves a lot of brutal murders, puts a bunch of bad guys away (sometimes without witnesses), and looks out for a whole lot of people who are not capable of doing it for themselves. If ever Southwestern Louisiana had a white knight, his name was Dave Robicheaux.

The Neon Rain tells us that Dave is a Vietnam veteran still plagued with bad dreams and other symptoms of PTSS, that he has a fifteen-month younger half-brother who makes his living just over the edge of what is legal, that he went to college in Lafayette (home of the Raging Cajuns), that he is always one drink away from his next bender, and that his wife left him for a Houston oilman. But this imperfect life is only the point that readers climb on to Dave’s story, an introduction to a character whose life will be a series of extraordinary peaks and valleys for another twenty books are so. And, as Dave closes the book on his career with the New Orleans cops, we are going to be lucky enough to go along for the ride. ( )