From time to time, I've mentioned Southern mystery writer James Lee Burke as figuring prominently among my list of favorite writers. Burke, an Edgar award-winner and Pulitzer Prize-nominee, enjoys great critical and commercial success with his New Iberia, Louisiana-based series featuring Detective Dave Robicheaux. He also has written several well-received books featuring Billy Bob Holland, a tough Texas lawyer.

Burke

But it is in his books set in New Orleans and the lush swamps of southern Louisiana that Burke really shines. I eagerly await each new Burke novel, especially the ones in the Robicheaux series. So naturally I was intrigued when I discovered that he'd taken a different route with his latest book, "White Doves at Morning."

The novel, which is the Sunday Book Club's May selection, is a fictional account of the experiences of two of Burke's ancestors, Willie Burke and Robert Perry, during the Civil War and Reconstruction. But the war often takes second stage to the human drama that is the center of Burke's story. He carefully threads together the different elements of his plot, which include Willie's dangerous friendship with a mulatto slave girl named Flower Jamison and the strong attraction both men feel for a local abolitionist named Abigail Dowling.

Two things stand out in Burke's latest novel: the characters and Burke's eye for including the small, intimate details that make his books such a joy to read for any fan of Southern fiction. I expected to see a great deal of Dave Robicheaux in Willie Burke, and I was not disappointed. Like Robicheaux, Willie displays a sensitivity, sophistication and tenderness that is a stark contrast to his less refined counterparts. Willie also displays the same irreverence and challenge to authority that often lands Robicheaux in trouble. (I sometimes suspect these are traits they have in common with the author himself.)

But Willie is different from Robicheaux in that he's a little more thoughtful, a little less reckless and a little less morally conflicted. Burke also writes a significant part of the story from the point of view of Abigail Dowling, and the addition of a woman's voice to the story is refreshing.

"White Doves at Morning" is a beautifully written, masterful portrait of the 19th century South. Some of the more notable passages in the novel come from Abigail's story:

"Her thoughts were still on the colonel and his illegitimate daughter, the slave girl Flower, when she took a public carriage downtown that evening and walked to the room provided her by the Sanitary Commission. She stopped at the open-air market and bought a fried catfish sandwich and sat on a bench by the river, watching the paddlewheelers in the sunset and the children playing in the street. The wind smelled of wet trees and rain falling on warm stone in a different part of the city, and when she closed her eyes she felt more alone that she had ever felt in her life.

"She had dedicated herself to the plight of the infirm and the abandoned and the oppressed who had no voice, hadn't she? Why this unrelieved sense of loneliness, of always feeling that the comforting notion of safe harbor would never be hers? "Because there was no one solidly defined world she belonged to, no one family, no one person, she thought. She saw herself in an accurate way only twice during any given twenty-four hour period, at twilight and at false dawn, when the world was neither night nor day, when shadows gave ambiguity a legitimacy that sunlight did not."

Those who have read the Robicheaux novels will recognize several landmarks and character names in "White Doves at Morning." For example, the brutal Angola Penitentiary often mentioned in the Robicheaux series appears in "Doves" as Angola Plantation, which is owned by Flower's father, Ira Jamison, and ruled mercilessly by Rufus Atkins, one of Burke's more sinister villains. Other names, such as "Mouton" and "LaRose" also strike a note of familiarity with Burke fans.

It's always interesting when a writer finds a way to unify the various plotlines of different novels, and for those who are new to Burke's writing, "White Doves at Morning" represents a good introduction to a talented writer whose stories are always fresh and entertaining.

To contact Regina C. Davis, use e-mail or call 348-7936.