**** Poppy Z. Brite: Soul Kitchen, Three Rivers, $13.95. Rickey and G-Man, life partners and owner-chefs of the New Orleans restaurant Liquor (every recipe uses booze), hire a gifted cook who was convicted ten years earlier of the murder of his boss. Despite a corpse in the opening pages, the mystery plot is extremely slight, but good writing, involving characters, and a detailed culinary background, including some pointed satire on the foody avant-garde, make this my top choice of the books under review. According to an author’s note, the novel was completed the night before Katrina hit.
**** Tony Dunbar: Tubby Meets Katrina, NewSouth, $24.95. Big Easy lawyer Tubby Dubonnet’s titular opponent is not only the hurricane but also an escaped murderer who identifies with the storm. The first fully post-Katrina suspense novel is a first-rate job, crisply written and expertly paced, offering a harrowing, sometimes sardonic description of the city’s physical and psychological state before, during, and after the disaster.
*** David Fulmer: Rampart Street, Harcourt, $25. French Creole private detective Valentin St. Cyr’s third case brings to life the Crescent City of 1910, with its “jass” music and flamboyant vice, its social, racial, sexual, and political complexities. When a wealthy citizen is murdered in the wrong part of town, his daughter refuses to accept the obvious sordid explanation.
*** O’Neil De Noux: New Orleans Confidential, PointBlank/Wildside, $16.95. Private eye Lucien Caye, operating in the French Quarter of the late 1940s, takes on eleven highly varied cases, three new to print, ranging from heartfelt tributes to the World War II generation to full-out erotica. One common element, the vivid depiction of the sights, smells, and sounds of the city, is augmented by James Sallis’s beautifully written introduction.
*** James Lee Burke: Pegasus Descending, Simon and Schuster, $26. New Orleans is a secondary background in the latest case for New Iberia cop Dave Robicheaux, whose cases are steeped in Louisiana ethnic, political, and religious culture. The action is pre-Katrina, but the effects and aftermath are addressed in an optimistic epilogue. Despite Burke’s over-fondness for macho confrontation and the rambling nature of the complicated plot, there’s no denying the beauty of the writing.
*** Barbara Colley: Married to the Mop, Kensington, $22. In her fifth appearance, housecleaning entrepreneur Charlotte LaRue helps a mobster’s battered wife prepare for a Mardi Gras party. Apart from a good punning title, the book has sound writing, construction, and characterization; and a reasonably intriguing plot (though unclued in the classical sense) culminating in a moral dilemma.
** Laura Childs: Motif for Murder, Berkley, $22.95. In the early pages of this intermittently amusing, nancydrewish cozy, Carmela Bertrand alternates unbelievably between agony over the kidnapping of her worthless jerk of a husband and bright banter in the sitcom world of her French Quarter scrapbooking shop, Memory Mine. While promoters of tour-ism will applaud the depiction of a post-Katrina New Orleans restored to business as usual, others may find it somewhat insensitive toward the bulk of the displaced population.
** Jay Bonansinga: Twisted, Pinnacle, $6.99. At 347 pages, FBI profiler Ulysses Grove’s storm-tossed battle with a serial killer called The Holy Ghost is more supernatural horror than mystery and exemplifies thriller bloat. Numbing repetitiousness, soggy romance, and clichéd dialogue detract from good action writing and interesting technical detail as a hurricane devastates New Orleans. The novel was written before Katrina but revised after.
Copyright © 2006 Jon L. Breen
Acts of Contrition
by Greg Herren
Greg Herren is a longtime resident of New Orleans and has written five mystery novels set there, including Mardi Gras Mambo. He has been nominated for three Lambda Awards for Best Mystery, and his novel Bourbon Street Blues was cited by InsightOut Books as the best mystery of 2003. He lives in the lower Garden District and has no plans to relocate. Ever.
“Help me, Father,” she cried. Her brown eyes were wide open with terror. The rain was falling, drenching them both, soaking her white T-shirt so that it clung to her body. Her dread-locked hair was dripping with water. The water ran down her face, streaming from her chin as she gripped his arms with her black-fingernailed hands. She reached for one of his hands and drew it to the crevice between her breasts. “Please, Father,” she pleaded again. He didn’t pull his hand away from her cold chest. He knew in his heart he should, but somehow he couldn’t. He let it rest there, feeling her frantic heartbeat through her cold, wet skin, and closed his eyes. This is a test, he reminded himself, a test. But still he left his hand there, betraying the collar he was wearing, betraying his God. He tried to pray for strength, for guidance, but all he could think about was the feel of her skin beneath his hand. Push her away, reprimand her for her temptation, do something, anything, don’t just stand here with your hands on her... be strong, find strength from your love of God, but don’t just keep standing here...
His hand remained where it was.
And she began to laugh, her lips pulling back into a smile of exultation. Her eyes glowed with triumph.
“Fallen priest, fallen priest,” she chanted between her laughter, “You’re going to hell, aren’t you, Father?”
He pulled back from her, staring at her face as it changed. She wasn’t Molly anymore, the sweet young runaway he was trying to help, she was something else, something evil. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and he opened his mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
“Fallen priest, you’re nothing but a fallen priest.” Her voice deepened and she took a step forward, her lips still curled in that horrible smile. She tore at the collar of her T-shirt, ripping it downward and exposing herself. She grabbed his hand again, and pulled it to her breasts.
“Get thee behind me, Satan,” he finally managed to choke out, provoking her to more laughter. It echoed off the alleyway, and a light went on in a house a few yards from where he was standing. “Stop,” he whispered, glancing at the lighted window.
“What are you so afraid of, fallen priest?” she leered, her lips pulling back even further. “That you’ll be exposed for what you are?” And she laughed again, throwing her head back and sending the sound upward, to the spires of the cathedral, and more lights were going on up the alleyway.
“Please,” he said, and pulled his hand away from her. Where the knife came from he had no idea. One moment there was nothing and in the next it was there, in his hand, the sword of the Lord. It glowed with a righteous, cleansing blue fire. It pulsed and throbbed in his hand with an almost unimaginable power. Tears filled his eyes as he raised his hand. “Please,” he whispered again, not wanting to do it, knowing he had no choice. He brought the knife down into her chest. Black blood splattered, spilling down her stomach and onto her wet denim skirt. Yet still she laughed, and he brought it down again, tears flowing down his face and mingling with the rain. She must be cleansed, she must be cleansed, she must be cleansed, he thought as he kept swinging his arm. She must be cleansed... cleansed... cleansed... and he hacked at her, the blood spurting and splashing, mixing with the rain, and yet still she laughed...
He sat up in his bed, wide awake and shivering, his body damp with sweat, his short, graying hair plastered to his scalp. He wiped at his face. It was still raining, the windows fogged up. He sat there, hugging his thin arms around himself trying to get warm. The digital clock on the nightstand read 9:23 A.M., but it was still dark as night. Lightning flashed, so near it was merely a sudden bright light blinding him, followed almost immediately by a roar of thunder that rattled his windows. It had been raining for days, one storm rolling in after another, filling the gutters and streets with water, swirling as the city’s pumping system desperately tried to keep up. The ground was soaked, the big elephant ferns outside his door waving in the wind and drenching him every time he walked outside. He tried to slow his heartbeat by taking deep breaths, and he slowly felt warmth creeping through his body again. He threw back the covers and swung his bare feet down to the cracked linoleum. He walked over to the opposite wall.