The Neon Rain A Dave Robicheaux Novel [Paperback]

FromNew York Timesbestselling author James Lee Burke comes his definitive, must-read first title in his famous Dectective David Robicheaux series.

New Orleans Detective Dave Robicheaux has fought too many battles: in Vietnam, with police brass, with killers and hustlers, and the bottle. Lost without his wife's love, Robicheaux haunts the intense and heady French Quarter—the place he calls home, and the place that nearly destroys him when he beomes involved in the case of a young prostitute whose body is found in a bayou. Thrust into the seedy world of drug lords and arms smugglers, Robicheaux must face down the criminal underworld and come to terms with his own bruised heart and demons to survive.Chapter One

The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary. The anti-capital-punishment crowd -- priests, nuns in lay clothes, kids from LSU with burning candles cupped in their hands -- were praying outside the fence. But another group was there too -- a strange combination of frat boys and rednecks -- drinking beer from Styrofoam coolers filled with cracked ice; they were singing Glow, Little Glow Worm, and holding signs that read THIS BUD IS FOR YOU, MASSINA AND JOHNNY, START YOUR OWN SIZZLER FRANCHISE TODAY.

I'm Lieutenant Dave Robicheaux, New Orleans police department, I said to one of the guards on the gate. I opened my badge for him.

Oh yeah, Lieutenant. I got your name on my clipboard. I'll ride with you up to the Block, he said, and got in my car. His khaki sleeves were rolled over his sunburned arms, and he had the flat green eyes and heavy facial bones of north Louisiana hill people. He smelled faintly of dried sweat, Red Man, and talcum powder. I don't know which bunch botlsð