These darker crime stories are great for those who like a little grit and violence in their stories. Dashiell Hammett popularized the style before Raymond Chandler really refined it.
During Prohibition, the Mississippi flowed with contraband. Rumrunners could make fortunes in New Orleans. Some got away with murder.Wesley Farrell, half-caste son of an Irish policeman, is no stranger to violence and death, but he’s deeply affected when a bright young Federal agent is gunned down right in front of him. A few years later, [...] Read More →
Robert Skinner has written three books in a series that takes place during the Depression in New Orleans. He selected the Depression because of stories family members told him about living during that time and how it affected them. To him, “the ’30s represent America’s last romantic age.’ Even so he is cognizant of how [...] Read More →
A former U.S. Senator vanishes days after his son goes missing. When they’re both found dead on a golf course, body parts missing, in Mexico, the Senator’s estranged daughter Rebecca resolves to discover what happened. Private investigator Cape Weathers doesn’t really want the case. He can’t stand politicians and doesn’t know the terrain. But when [...] Read More →
Autumn 1940—A black woman named Louise Blanc is found tortured to death in her Gentilly home. Sergeant Israel Daggett can’t make anything of it until a Treasury agent arrives on the scene to let him know that Louise Blanc was the girlfriend of a bootlegger-turned-counterfeiter named Luis Martinez. On the other side of town, Wesley [...] Read More →
Cincinnati homicide Detective Will Borders now walks with a cane and lives alone with constant discomfort. He’s lucky to be alive. He’s lucky to have a job, as public information officer for the department. But when a star cop is brutally murdered, he’s assigned to find her killer. The crime bears a chilling similarity to [...] Read More →
Cheryl Beth Wilson is an elite nurse at Cincinnati Memorial Hospital who finds a doctor brutally murdered in a secluded office. Wilson had been having an affair with the doctor’s husband, a surgeon, and this makes her a ‘person of interest’ to the police, if not at outright suspect. But someone other than the cops [...] Read More →
December 1941: Jessica Richards, daughter of corrupt New Orleans councilman Whitman Richards, is the victim of a sensational daylight kidnapping from the grounds of a Catholic girls’ academy. Richards, a man with many enemies, outrages both his wife and police Captain Frank Casey by throwing the police off the case. Is it because the kidnapper [...] Read More →