A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux Series #4)

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James Lee Burke

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Overview

Clutching the shards, of his shattered life, Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux has rejoined the New lberia police force.

His partner is dead — slain during a condemned prisoner's bloodyflight to freedom that left Robicheaux critically wounded...and reawakened the ghost of his haunted, violent past.

Now he's trailing a killer into the sordid head of die Big Easy-caught up in the lethal undercurrents of a mob double-cross...confronting his most dangerous enemy: himself

Cajun police detective Dave Robicheaux knows the Sonnier family of New Iberia--their connections to the CIA, the mob and to a former Klansman now running for state office. And he knows their dark and murky past. Now an assassination attempt has drawn Robicheaux into the Sonniers' web of madness, murder, and incest.

Editorial Reviews

Boston Sunday Herald

A nifty, gritty thriller that takes a double dip into crime New Orleans style.

Chicago Tribune

Takes Off Like A Rocket . . . Burke Drops In Color And vibrant Characters With Masterly Precision. His Action Scenes Crackle.

More Reviews (3) Fewer Reviews

Detroit Free Press

Intense, Moving. . . Electrifying . . . Burke Is A Gale-Force Wind . . . You Have To Look Hard To Find A Better Writer.

Publishers Weekly

Sadistic villains and interior demons plague Cajun police detective Dave Robicheaux as the murder of a local cop draws him into the painful conflicts of the Sonnier family, with whom he grew up near the bayous. Weldon Sonnier, an oil speculator perhaps involved with organized crime in New Orleans, is married to the sister of racist Louisiana politician Bobby Earl; Lyle Sonnier is a televangelist with a widely publicized gift of healing that antagonizes the detective, whose wife has lupus; Weldon and Lyle's sister, Drew, whom Robicheaux loved as a teenager, is New Iberia's liberal eccentric. Harshly abused as children, the Sonniers exert a strong pull on Robicheaux, whose desire to help pits him and his former New Orleans police department partner Cletus Purcel against southern Louisiana's fierce Mafia leader and his hired thugs, one of whom, Robicheaux observes, has a face with the ``moral depth and complexity of freshly poured cement.'' While attending AA meetings, trying to cope with both his response to his wife's illness and his moral rage at Earl's politicking, Robicheaux pursues killers through biker bars and unearths long-buried secrets in the Sonnier past. Burke ( A Morning for Flamingos ) resolves the complex case in a satisfying climax as Robicheaux comes to terms with social ills, the evil of individuals and his own helplessness to overcome them. $100,000 ad/promo. (Apr.)

Kirkus Reviews

Another dark rhapsody on Burke's favorite themes—power and vengeance, organized crime, maverick Louisiana lawmen, and nightmares from Vietnam—all pulled together more tightly than ever by the Sonnier family, threatened by somebody (oilman brother Weldon's mob contacts? televangelist brother Lyle's stray sheep? sister Drew's old political enemies? brother-in-law Bobby Earl's followers in the Aryan Nation? hateful paterfamilias Verise, long presumed dead in a tanker explosion?) who first shoots out Weldon's window and then executes a cop in the family basement. There'll be more violence—much more—and enough guilt for everybody, as New Iberia detective Dave Robicheaux, instead of maundering over the issues, as in Black Cherry Blues (1989) and A Morning for Flamingos (1990), turns in his finest performance to date. By no means a well-made detective story—the Sonniers' coincidental bad luck rivals Job's—but a wholly original tale of crime and revenge, inside and outside the law. This series keeps getting stronger and stronger.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780380713608
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 8/28/1991
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 384
Sales rank: 97,194
Series: Dave Robicheaux Series , #4
Product dimensions: 4.18 (w) x 6.75 (h) x 0.96 (d)

Meet the Author

James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke is the author of nineteen novels, including eleven starring the Detective Dave Robicheaux. Burke grew up on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast, where he now lives with his wife, Pearl, and spends several months of the year in Montana.

Biography

In November 1999, The Atlantic Monthly -- under the headline, "Soft Boiled: Detectives Aren't What They Used to Be" -- noted an odd turn of events in the crime fiction genre: the strong-and-silent hero was on the wane, replaced instead by a bunch of chatty Cathys. "The 1990s detective can't shut up about anything. It's hard to go even a few pages without being assaulted by a confession of inner feelings." As an example, it offered James Lee Burke's Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux, who "was in Vietnam 'in the early days of the war,' and this has left him with a sizable reservoir of musings about personal anger, which he taps frequently."

But put the aromatherapy away. Robicheaux -- Burke's best-known character and the launch of his financial success as a writer -- is no sensitive New Age guy. He's a police detective who holds his own on the mean streets of New Orleans, who faces the perils of alcoholism every day, and who supplements his work policing the Louisiana parish of New Iberia with running his bait shop on the bayou. Ropy with muscle, he can take -- and, if necessary -- throw a punch with the best of them.

Robicheaux is one of the stars of a series that started with The Neon Rain and continued with such titles as Heaven's Prisoners (turned into a 1996 movie with Alec Baldwin and Kelly Lynch), In the Electric Mist with the Confederate Dead and A Stained White Radiance. The other star is the Louisiana swamp country itself, which shimmers to life at the touch of Burke's pen. The smell of brackish water all but wafts off the page.

And in Robicheaux, Burke has created a complicated and often conflicted protagonist driven by a fierce moral code. "There is a pronounced streak of poetry in Mr. Burke's prose," The New York Times wrote in 1988. "He has the knack of combining action with reflection; he has pity for the human condition, and even his villains can have some sympathetic and redeeming qualities."

Like Robicheaux, Burke himself is a recovering alcoholic. He contributes his teenage drinking to his poor academic standing in high school, and it dogged him throughout much of his career as a writer. Even when he was sober for five years, he has said he still suffered from the same problems as an alcoholic and didn't truly find sanctuary until he joined a 12-step group.

His early days as a writer, in the 1960s, were marked by critical success that he thought meant he was on his way. But after his third novel met with so-so reviews, he only published one book for the next 15 years, supporting his family with an assortment of jobs -- teaching, social work, pipefitting. One novel, The Lost-Get Back Boogie, went unpublished for nearly a decade and was rejected roughly 100 times before finally being picked up by Louisiana State University Press. (It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.)

Burke credits LSU Press for resurrecting his career. Three years later, when the third Robicheaux novel, Black Cherry Blues, was published, Burke was beginning to reach a wider audience. After the ninth, he launched a new crime series, this one featuring Texas Ranger-turned-lawyer Billy Bob Holland. Despite the shift from the swamps of Louisiana to the dusty streets of Deaf Smith, Texas, much is the same in Burke's new franchise. "The themes that stalk Dave Robicheaux through the swamps in James Lee Burke's Louisiana mysteries -- the arrogance of wealth, the corruption of power and the price a man must pay for the sins of his past -- trail Burke's new series hero, a country lawyer named Billy Bob Holland, out to Texas hill country," The New York Times wrote in a 1999 review of the second book in the series, Heartwood.

He now has a readership for both Robicheaux and Holland. But he has been careful not to take it for granted. In 1996, even after he had three straight books on The New York Times bestsellers list and was building a second home in New Iberia -- to match his house in Missoula -- Burke was vigilant about not letting the mantle of success rest too comfortably on his shoulders.

"By the time I was 35, I had three books published. I thought I was home free," he told People. "But that was vanity. I went a dozen years without selling a book. I couldn't sell ice water in hell."

Good To Know

When Burke is writing, he's typing blind. "I don't think up the stories," he told Publishers Weekly in 1992. "I'm convinced they're already written in the unconscious. My work is simply a day-to-day discovery. I never see more than two scenes around the corner and I don't know a book's ending until the last pages."

His college English papers earned him a string of D-minuses until he talked to his professor about what was wrong. "She said, 'Your spelling is an assault upon the eyeballs. Your penmanship makes me wish the Phoenicians had not developed the alphabet. But I couldn't give you an F because you have so much heart,'" he said in a 1996 interview with People. "Every Saturday I went with her and rewrote the essay for the week. I got a B and made the dean's list. (She) changed my life."

The 1993 publication of Two for Texas marked Burke's return to bookshelves after 11 years. Unable to sell a book after Lay Down My Sword and Shield, Burke finally broke the bad luck streak with his historical novel about the Texas Revolution of 1835. Kris Kristofferson starred in the 1998 TV movie adaptation, which aired on TNT.

1. Hometown:
  
  New Iberia, Louisiana and Missoula, Montana
1. Date of Birth:
  
  December 5, 1936
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Houston, Texas
1. Education:
  
  B.A., University of Missouri, 1959; M.A., University of Missouri, 1960
2. Website:
  
  http://www.jamesleeburke.com/

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

I had known the Sonnier family all my life. I had attended the Catholic elementary school in New Iberia with three of them, had served with one of them in Vietnam, and for a short time had dated Drew, the youngest child, before I went away to the war. But, as I learned with Drew, the Sonniers belonged to that group of people whom you like from afar, not because of what they are themselves, but because of what they represent--a failure in the way that they're put together, a collapse of some genetic or familial element that it should be the glue of humanity.

The background of the Sonnier children was one that youinstinctively knew you didn't want to know more about, in the same way that you don't want to hear the story of a desperate and driven soul in an after-hours bar. As a police officer it has been my experience that pedophiles are able to operate and stay functional over long periods of time and victimize scores, even hundreds, of children, because no one wants to believe his or her own intuitions about the symptoms in the perpetrator. We are repelled and sickened by the images thatour own minds suggest, and we hope against hope that the problem is in reality simply one of misperception.

Systematic physical cruelty toward children belongs in the same shoebox. Nobody wants to deal with it. I cannot remember one occasion, in my entire life, when I saw one adult interfere in a public place with the mistreatment of a child at the hands of another adult. Prosecutors often wince when they have to take a child abuser to trial, because usually the only witnesses they can use are children who are terrified at theprospect of testifying against their parents. And ironically a successful prosecution means that the victim will become a legal orphan, to be raised by foster parents or in a state institution that is little more than a warehouse for human beings.

As a child I saw the cigarette bums on the arms and legs of the Sonnier children. They were scabbed over and looked like coiled; gray worms. I came to believe that the Sonniers grew up in a furnace rather than a home.

It was a lovely spring day when the dispatcher at the Iberia Parish sheriff's office, where I worked as a plainclothes detective, called me at home and said that somebody had fired a gun through Weldon Sonnier's dining--room window and I could save time by going out there directly rather than reporting to the office first.

I was at my breakfast table, and through the open window I could smell the damp, fecund odor of the hydrangeas in my flower bed and last night's rainwater dripping out of the pecan and oak trees in the yard. It was truly a fine morning, the early sunlight as soft as smoke in the tree limbs.

"Are you there, Dave?" the dispatcher said.

"Ask the sheriff to send someone else on this one," I said.

"You don't like Weldon?"

"I like Weldon. I just don't like, some of the things that probably go on in Weldon's head.

"Okay, I'll tell the old man."

"Never mind," I said. "I'll head out there in about fifteen minutes. Give me the rest of it."

"That's all we got. His wife called it in. He didn't. Does that sound like Weldon?" He laughed.

People said Weldon had spent over two hundred thousand dollars restoring his antebellum home out in the parish on Bayou Teche. It was built of weathered white-painted brick, with a wide columned porch, a second-floor verandah that wrapped all the way around the house, ventilated green win-dow shutters, twin brick chimneys at each extreme of thehouse, and scrolled ironwork that had been taken from historical buildings in the New Orleans French Quarter The long driveway that led from the road to the house was covered with a canopy of moss-hung live Oaks, but WeldonSonnier was not one to waste land space for the baroque and ornamental. All the property in front of the house, even the area down by the bayou where the slave quarters had once I rice stood, had been leased to tenants who planted sugar cane on it.

It had always struck me as ironic that Weldon would pay out so much of his oil money in order to live in an antebellum home, whereas in fact he had grown up in an Acadian farmhouse that was over one hundred and fifty years old, a beautiful piece of hand-hewn, notched, and pegged cypress architecture, that members of the New Iberia historical preservation society openly wept over when Weldon hired a group of half-drunk black men out of a ramshackle, backroad nightclub, gave them crowbars and axes, and calmly smoked a cigar and sipped from a glass of Cold Duck On top of a fence rail while they ripped the old Sonnier house into a pile of boards he later sold for two hundred dollars to a cabinetmaker.

When I drove my pickup truck down the driveway and parked under a spreading oak by the front Porch, two uniformed deputies were waiting for me in their car, their front doors open to let in the breeze that blew across the shaded lawn. The driver, an ex-Houston COP named Garrett, a barrel of a man with a thick blond mustache and a face the color of a fresh sunburn, flipped his cigarette into the rose bed and stood up to meet me. He wore pilot's sunglasses, and a green dragon was tattooed around his right forearm. He was still new, and I didn'tknow him well, but I'd heard that he had resigned from the Houston force after he had been suspended during an internal Affairs investigation.

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SlapShot62

Posted August 8, 2010

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Burke Always Gives a Good Ride

I'm reading these in order and am completely hooked on the Robicheaux series and the character himself. Admittedly flawed, always willing to put himself in harm's way for others, doggedly determined, and fighting the good fights....what's not to like? Throw in Burke's writing style, which is simply great and characters added or revisiting from other novels - all with depth and "realness" to them, and you have a winning series and one of our great mystery/thriller writers.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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A Morning for Flamingos (Dave Robicheaux Series #4)

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Boston Sunday Herald

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Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

Meet the Author

James Lee Burke

Biography

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