Morning for Flamingos, A

Being a Southern California-based mystery author with my debut novel in its initial release, I realize that there is quite a bit of debate about which crime fiction author best captures the ambience of my native SoCal. There is no debate involving Louisiana. James Lee Burke is clearly the master, and I believe A MORNING FOR FLAMINGOS is Burke's strongest work. Dave Robicheaux is left for dead during a prison escape, yet he doesn't die. He ends up back on the New Iberia police force going after a drug-kingpin named Tony Cardo. Clete Purcel tags along to guard Robicheaux's back, and they wouldn't mind catching up with the man who nearly killed Robicheaux. A MORNING FOR FLAMINGOS has a marvelous plot and well-drawn characters. Reading this book is like visiting that fabulous state of mind known as Louisiana.

This is, without a doubt, one of the better of the Dave Robicheaux novels. As always, James Lee Burke writes with a lyrical grace that should awe the average reader. And this early novel was written before he started plagiarizing himself wholesale, stealing plots, characters and even entire paragraphs in order to flesh out his balletic swamp-songs. A black mark on this otherwise fine novel is the odd decision to have Dave go undercover in the home of Mobster Tony Cardo, a razor-edged freak of a man living on the outlines of his own criminal organization. Personally, if I were a crook, I'd never accept an ex-cop into my home, but maybe that's just me - the fact is that tony does and that's how this rollicking book gets going. It's not important that there's any more plot than that - in a Burkle novel, the setting is the most important element. As always, Burke paints pictures and only incidentally places characters and action within them, with the exception of Dave Robicheaux himself. I have always admired Dave - he is morally ambiguous and righteously angry, which causes him to behave in ways that are almost as freakish as Tony Cardo's ways. An example is dave's heroism at the climax of this novel - it's both awe-inspiring and breathtaking, but it's probably not what I wold have done in the same situation. Burke is an amazing writer and a good story-teller. He's not a bad painter, either.

I'm reading the Dave Robicheaux series in order. The Dave Robicheaux of A Morning For Flamingoes is very different and a bit more likable than the one we me in Heaven's Prisoners. He is also one of the most complex characters I've ever encountered in a book.The book gets you hooked right from the start and introduces most of the books significant characters. As in the first two books, Dave finds himself being drawn into a world he doesn't really want to visit. Disturbingly, he doesn't seem to try to hard to get out, which is just another aspect of his character.Speaking of character, this book is fulled with fascinating characters, with Tony Cardo being the most interesting. It makes you hope that some of these characters will return in future volumes.I'm eagerly looking forward to A Stained White Radiance.

In this installment of the Dave Robicheaux series, James Lee Burke again paints a rich tapastry of the failings and triumphs of the human spirit set against the backdrop of southern Louisiana. As is true in his other novels, Burke uses his standard plot woven around career criminals, the disenfranchised,and the poor with a violent psychopath or two thrown in for good measure, to explore the complexity of human relationships and how and why past experiences can motivate us, even subconsicously, to behave in certain ways. All of Burke's characters are fully formed, three dimensional people that I felt like I knew by the end of the book. There wasn't a card board cutout among them. No body is ever really quite as good, or bad, as they initially seem( well, except for Jimmie Lee Boggs). I have read his books out of chronological order, and I do think there has been some drop off in recent years. Maybe this is due to building too many stories around the same basic plot of gangsters, low lifes, and crazed hitmen, or maybe now that Dave is married to Bootsie and has been in the same job for several novels, there hasn't been any room for any major new plot twists. Hopefully, Burke can explore Robicheaux's relationship with his daughter Alafair more as she becomes a young adult.

James Lee Burke didn't write "A Morning for Flamingos" in black and white ­ everything is in shades of gray. Yet what emerges is a richly textured mystery filled with a cast of characters as colorful as their Bayou surroundings. It starts when Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux rejoins the New Iberia police department to pay off a few thousand dollars of debt and is nearly killed when a routine convict transport goes bad. And it ends with him in a $500,000 drug deal facing off against the same escaped murderer who nearly kills him at the beginning. In between, Robicheaux fades to the background, becoming the eyes for the reader to see and evaluate everyone he encounters. There's his ex cop partner who now runs a bar, his old high school sweetheart who married into the mob and then couldn't break free, the top mob boss in New Orleans with a tender spot for his handicapped son, an illiterate "Negro" convicted of a crime he didn't commit but didn't stop and a bayou juju who has everyone scared of her. Yet unlike many mysteries where characters like these would be eccentrics to provide comic relief, this one brings them to life. They're real people with real-life struggles, fears and hopes. Burke accomplishes this feat with his masterful use of dialogue, proving once again that few, if any, mystery authors can convey personality, region and nuances better than he can. As a result, the reader will struggle with Robicheaux to decide what's moral, what's legal and what's just the right thing to do. Because this is not about rules and regulations ­ it's about people. And that's what makes this so good -- and Burke so special.