Start with The neon rain. It is the first book, it is the shortest, and this series is not a set of interchangeable cases: it is one man's continuous life, told over more than thirty years, and almost every later novel circles back to something that happened in the first two.
The obvious alternative is to open with Black Cherry Blues, which won the Edgar Award for best novel and is the book most people name as the point where the series becomes itself. Don't. It begins in the wreckage of an event at the end of Heaven's prisoners, and starting there turns the defining loss of Dave Robicheaux's life into backstory delivered in summary. The first two books are quick. Read them.
What the series actually is
Dave Robicheaux is a Vietnam veteran and a recovering alcoholic, working New Orleans homicide in book one and then, for most of what follows, as a detective for the sheriff's office in Iberia Parish, in the bayou country west of the city. His friend Clete Purcel — an ex-cop, a walking disaster, and the series' only reliable source of both comedy and catastrophic violence — appears in nearly all of them. James Lee Burke writes crime fiction the way other novelists write landscape: weather, water, light, food and the smell of the place take up as much room as the plot, and the plots are less puzzles than moral weather systems. If you want tight procedural mystery, this is the wrong series. If you want a sense of American place few writers match, it is the right one.
The first run
The neon rain, Heaven's prisoners, Black Cherry Blues, A morning for flamingos, A Stained White Radiance, In the electric mist with Confederate dead, Dixie City jam, Burning Angel and Cadillac Jukebox are the first nine books, in order, and they are the strongest continuous stretch Burke has written. In the electric mist with Confederate dead is the one readers press on newcomers: a serial-killer investigation braided with Dave's conversations with a long-dead Confederate general, which the book declines to explain away. It is also the first sign of where the series eventually goes.
What is missing from this list
This path holds fourteen of roughly two dozen novels. Not here, and worth knowing about: Sunset Limited, Jolie Blon's Bounce, Crusader's Cross, Pegasus Descending, Swan Peak, Creole Belle, Light of the World, Robicheaux, The New Iberia Blues and the recent Clete, which hands the narration to Purcel. That is a gap in our catalogue, not in the series. If you read straight through you will want the full publication list beside you.
The stretch that repeats itself
Most readers find the mid-2000s books the weakest, and the complaint is specific rather than vague: a wealthy corrupt family, a sadistic enforcer with a folkloric nickname, Clete doing something unforgivable and funny, Dave standing at the edge of a drink. Burke is aware of the pattern and sometimes plays with it. If you hit two in a row that feel like the same novel, skip ahead to The Tin Roof Blowdown — the Hurricane Katrina book, and the one where the anger driving the whole series has an object worthy of it.
The late books
The glass rainbow and A Private Cathedral are the two late entries here, and the second is genuinely strange: its antagonist is something closer to a revenant than a criminal, and the supernatural element that earlier books kept at the edge of vision moves to the centre. Readers split hard on it. Nobody thinks it is a good place to begin.
Where to stop
The Tin Roof Blowdown is the natural summit, and stopping there leaves you with a complete arc. The glass rainbow is the other clean exit. Continuing past those means accepting an older writer's late manner — slower, more elegiac, more openly metaphysical. More crime series live on Discover.
Follow the full ordered path here: Dave Robicheaux Reading Order: Where to Start with James Lee Burke.
