Dave Robicheaux Books in Order: How to read James Lee Burke’s series?

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Now sheriff’s deputy in New Iberia, Louisiana, Dave Robicheaux was once an officer for the New Orleans Police Department. He’s got the tendency to breach the ethical code during his investigations.

The main protagonist in the series written by James Lee Burke, Vietnam vet Dave Robicheaux didn’t have an easy life, and this has not changed, but he keeps going on, doing his work.

How to read the Dave Robicheaux Series in Order?

Every entry in the Dave Robicheaux book series works as a standalone story, but the lives of the different characters evolve from one novel to the other.

1. The Neon Rain – 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, when he becomes involved in the case of a young prostitute whose body is found in a bayou.
2. Heaven’s Prisoners – Vietnam vet Dave Robicheaux has turned in his detective’s badge, is winning his battle against booze, and has left New Orleans with his wife for the tranquil beauty of Louisiana’s bayous. But a plane crash on the Gulf brings a young girl into his life-and with her comes a netherworld of murder, deception, and homegrown crime.
3. Black Cherry Blues – When Robicheaux begins investigating, he is led into the dark world of the Mafia and oil companies. At the same time, someone from his past comes back to haunt him. Someone who was responsible for Robicheaux’s flight from New Orleans–someone who brutally murdered his wife–and now is after young Alafair…

4. A Morning for Flamingos – Desperately holding together the pieces of his shattered life, Dave Robicheaux has rejoined the New Iberia police force. While transporting two death-row prisoners, Dave is wounded, his partner is killed. Now he’s trailing a killer into the heart of the Big Easy’s underworld.
5. A Stained White Radiance – Oil speculator Weldon Sonnier is the patriarch of a troubled family intimately bound to the CIA, the Mob, and the Klan. Now, the murder of a cop and a bizarre assassination attempt pull Detective Dave Robicheaux into the Sonniers’ hellish world of madness, murder, and incest.
6. In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead – When Hollywood invades New Iberia Parish to film a Civil War epic, restless specters waiting in the shadows for Dave Robicheaux are reawakened. Hunting a serial killer preying on the lawless young, Robicheaux comes face-to-face with the elusive guardians of his darkest torments.

7. Dixie City Jam – It’s out there off the Louisiana coast–a buried Nazi submarine. Dave Robicheaux has known if its existence since childhood, when he was terrified by nightmares of the evil Nazi sailors just offshore. Then, as a teenager, he stumbled upon the sunken sub while scuba diving–but for years he kept the secret of its watery grave.
8. Burning Angel – The Fontenot family has lived as sharecroppers on Bertrand land for as long as anyone in New Iberia, Louisiana, can remember. So why are they now being forced from their homes? But can Detective Dave Robicheaux make sense of it all before there is more bloodshed?
9. Cadillac Jukebox – Aaron Crown comes from a long line of shady Cajun characters, and rumors of Klan ties swirl around his family-so his arrest for the murder of a black civil rights leader would seem to be an open and shut case. But when the man who worked hardest to put Crown away ascends to the governor’s mansion, Dave Robicheaux begins to suspect that Aaron may be innocent of the crime.

10. Sunset Limited – Megan and Cisco Flynn are back in town. Nobody had ever been caught for the Klan murder of their father, Jack, and Dave Robicheaux knows that trouble cannot be far behind. Particularly when the Flynns get mixed up with the case of a small-time hustler named Cool Breeze Broussard.
11. Purple Cane Road – When Dave Robicheaux discovers disturbing secrets from his mother’s past, he embarks on a journey through a murky world of vice, politics and murder. Robicheaux has been told that his mother, Mae, was a hooker and ended her life drowned in a mud puddle by two cops working for the Mob.
12. Jolie Blon’s Bounce – Three men are present when Amanda Boudreau is raped and murdered, and small-time hustler Tee Bobby Hulin’s prints are found at the crime scene. Dave Robicheaux reckons he’s innocent, and Tee Bobby pleads so, then attempts suicide in his holding cell. Why?

13. Last Car to Elysian Fields – It is a rainy late-summer’s night in New Orleans. Dave Robicheaux is about to confront the man who may have savagely assaulted his friend, Father Jimmie Dolan. But things are never as they seem and soon Robicheaux is back in New Iberia, probing a car crash that killed three teenage girls.
14. Crusader’s Cross – But a dying man’s confession forces Robicheaux to resurrect a decades-old mystery with a missing woman at its heart. Her name may or may not have been Ida Durbin, and Robicheaux’s half-brother, Jimmie, paid a brutal price for entering her world.
15. Pegasus Descending – When a nice young woman named Trish Klein blows into Louisiana, passing hundred-dollar bills in local casinos, Dave Robicheaux senses a storm bearing down on his new life of contentment…

16. The Tin Roof Blowdown – Hurricane Katrina has left the commercial district and residential neighborhoods awash with looters and predators of every stripe. In the midst of an apocalyptical nightmare, Robicheaux must find two serial rapists, a morphine-addicted priest, and a vigilante who may be more dangerous than the criminals looting the city.
17. Swan Peak – Dave Robicheaux, his wife, and his buddy Clete Purcell have retreated to an old friend’s ranch, hoping to enjoy their distance from the harsh, gritty landscape of Louisiana post-Katrina. But the serenity is soon shattered when two college students are found brutally murdered in the hills behind where the Robicheauxs and Purcell are staying.
18. The Glass Rainbow – The brutal murders of seven young women in a neighboring parish pull Robicheaux from his New Iberia home into a case with all the telltale signs of a serial killer. Except that one of the victims, a high school honors student, doesn’t fit.

19. Creole Belle – Dave Robicheaux is in a recovery unit in New Orleans, where a Creole girl named Tee Jolie Melton visits him and leaves him an iPod with the country blues song ‘Creole Belle’ on it. Then she disappears. Dave becomes obsessed with the song and the memory of Tee Jolie and goes in search of her sister.
20. Light of the World – Sadist and serial killer Asa Surrette narrowly escaped the death penalty for the string of heinous murders he committed while capital punishment was outlawed in Kansas. But following a series of damning articles written by Dave Robicheaux’s daughter Alafair, Surrette escapes from a prison transport van and heads to Montana, where an unsuspecting Dave-along with Alafair; Dave’s wife, Molly; Dave’s faithful partner Clete; and Clete’s newfound daughter, Gretchen Horowitz-have come to take in the sweet summer air.
21. Robicheaux – During a murder investigation, Dave Robicheaux discovers he may have committed the homicide he’s investigating, one which involved the death of the man who took the life of Dave’s wife. As he works to clear his name and make sense of the murder, Robicheaux encounters a cast of characters that threaten to destroy all of those whom he loves.

22. The New Iberia Blues – Dave Robicheaux has discovered the body of a young woman who’s been crucified, wearing only a small chain on her ankle. She disappeared near Desmond Cormier’s Cyrpemort Point estate, and Robicheaux is looking for answers.
23. A Private Cathedral – The Shondell and Balangie families are longtime enemies in the New Iberia criminal underworld and show each other no mercy. Yet their heirs, Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie have fallen in love and run away after Isolde was given as a sex slave to Johnny’s father. As he seeks to uncover why, Detective Dave Robicheaux gets too close to both Isolde’s mother and the mistress of her father. In retribution, he hires a mysterious assassin to go after Robicheaux and his longtime partner, Clete Purcel.

If you like our article about the Dave Robicheaux reading order, don’t forget to bookmark it! If you want more New Orleans in your books, take a look at the Lew Griffin series by James Sallis.