BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Bayou Mystery of Love, Murder, Race : BURNING ANGEL by James Lee Burke; Hyperion; $22.95, 352 pages

Perhaps the greatest treat for me on finishing “Burning Angel” was the discovery that James Lee Burke has a dozen earlier novels in print, six of which are about to be released in paperback. This means that the pleasure of enjoying his superlative prose and again meeting Dave Robicheaux is as close as the nearest book shop.

Dave Robicheaux is Burke’s remarkable creation. He is a Cajun detective attached to the sheriff’s office in rural Iberia Parish, about a half an hour’s drive from New Orleans. The setting is southern Louisiana, the sunken farmland on the Bayou and the famous city as well, the posh Garden District and the sometimes seedy and racially mixed French Quarter.

“Burning Angel” is crime fiction at its best. The writing is crisp but not hard-edged. This detective blanches at corpses. The murders in this novel are ugly and bloody but the author spares the reader lurid details. Instead he reminds us that the dead had lives cut off too soon, and it is to appease their memories that Robicheaux relentlessly pursues the killer.

Burke has successfully homesteaded this turf, not taking it away from Tennessee Williams, but extending it beyond the still-functioning city street car lines into the freeways of the late 20th century. Burke brings this peculiarly American landscape into sharp focus.

As Burke sees it, life in the Mississippi Delta is haunted by an unusual history: from the beginning the area differed from the rest of the United States. It was settled by the French and has a history of pirate heroes and their legacy of buried treasure. During the 19th century it played a dual role in the tragedy of African slavery: its rice and sugar plantations were the last stop, the down-the-river where unruly slaves were worked to death; but in the city free people of color formed a rich society.

While these historic roots are unique to Louisiana, detective Robicheaux’s consciousness is equally haunted by the more recent and national memories of Vietnam and of the subsequent dirty operations the CIA conducted in Central America.

As part of our national memory, even if they are often ignored or lost in the sweep of newer horrors, these new memories are also well suited to the Louisiana setting. Atrocities performed in remote tropical forests find an echo in the humid gardens of New Orleans.

“Burning Angel” opens with the threat of murder when a seemingly reformed gangster, Sonny Boy Marsellus, asks Robicheaux to help him. The first murder is not Sonny Boy, though, but a young woman unlucky enough to have crossed his path. Sonny Boy is like the tar baby--those who touch him are targeted for death--and the body count mounts as Robicheaux persists, even when fired from his job, in trying to solve the crimes.

A second plot line concerns African American friends of Robicheaux who are suddenly evicted from land they believe they own. Robicheaux, self-conscious that he is a white man, is tormented with evidence of white chicanery, but even as he is eager to right what wrongs he can, he feels it is presumptuous for him to believe he can understand the grievances of the African Americans among whom he has grown up. These include the man he shares a bait shop with on his river front property, a man who seems to understands all about bait: how it works both for fish and for people.

Burke probes Robicheaux’s mind through the literary device of dreams--a quicksand of cliches in less skillful hands. He has Robicheaux remember that “Milton and Shakespeare both said lucidity and power lay in the world of dreams . . . that has always meant that sleep and the unconscious can define what daylight and rationality cannot.”

Robicheaux dreams of the ancient past when the bayou was pristine, then filled with African slaves and finally peopled by free African Americans. He sees their agony in the great oak trees near the river where lengths of mooring chains were driven with huge spokes into the trunks, and grew “in and out of the bark like calcified rust-sheathed serpents. Over the years, the chains had been drawn deeper into the heart of the tree, like orange-encrusted iron cysts in the midst of living tissue or perhaps unacknowledged and unforgiven sins.” Robicheaux awakens to see the connections between the sins of the whites and blacks entangled in this case.

Powerful images like these are the currency of New Iberia’s detective, but they never interfere with the plot that moves swiftly but never directly, toward a conclusion.

This conclusion highlights the complicated racial histories, the exploitation of sexual love and ambition, that distinguish New Orleans from Malibu. As a nation we share certain historical memories, but not all. There is a kind of states’ rights for historical guilt, and James Burke has successfully tapped that particular well-spring in Louisiana.