Once considered to be only a regional success, James Lee Burke has proven those critics wrong. Since his big success of Neon Rain in 1987, Burke has become a national favorite centered at first around his main character Dave Robicheaux. Dave isn't your typical hero... a bit dark from his days in Vietnam and a bit cynical from his days of growing up around the southern elite and then later in life, with the CIA. These characteristics combine well into this novel leading-man hero who isn't pure to say the least... but he wants to do the right thing! Outdoorsman, racetrack buff and recovering alcoholic are all traits of Robicheaux. Many believe that this character is somewhat autobiographical since it is well known that Burke himself holds some of these attributes.

James Lee Burke's The Neon Rain begins with a New Orleans' detective visiting a professional killer in the Angola penitentiary hours before his execution. He wants to tell the detective of a jailhouse rumor; there is a contract out on the detective's life. Dave Robicheaux is his name. His search for the potential hit man takes increasingly strange and unexpected twists. Set up by a ring of drug dealers, Mafia chieftains, and an ex-general with shady dealings in Central America, he's kidnapped, drugged, and pumped with alcohol. Left for dead in a burning car, Robicheaux survives, but another detective does not. Robicheaux wakes up in a hospital to find that no one believes a far fetched story told by a drunk, and that he is suspended from duty. One man who could back him up dies in jail; he finds another murdered, and the identity of the killer is as shocking as the crime. Almost bringing about his own demise by trying to carry out justice without his badge, Robicheaux is rescued by a good woman who more than once saves him from his tormentors, and from himself. Tough, violent, but often surprisingly lyrical, The Neon Rain is a novel that leads the reader through a maze of intrigue and treachery and blind alleys that can end in sudden death.

In the follow up novel to Neon Rain, Burke wrote Heaven's Prisoners, later to become a successful movie of similar name. In this book, while fishing in the Gulf, Robicheaux and his wife Annie spot a two-engine plane trailing a thick black cloud of smoke and in obvious trouble. It crashes before their eyes. Trying to rescue survivors, Robicheaux finds that all are dead but for one... a child who was being flown in illegally from Central America. The little girl's mother had managed to push the young girl into an air pocket which had saved her life. Why was a small plane flying into Texas' waters from Central America? The plot has only begun!

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