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New Orleans in 1927. In the hot summer's night, Charles St, Clair imbibes absinthe laced with cocaine, and is slashed to death in the old slave shack he has converted to a boudoir for his extra-marital affairs. His wife of only a few months, the beautiful Hollywood sex symbol, Remy Lelourie is discovered covered in blodd cradling his body. Damon Rourke, homicide detective and his partner Fiorello Prankowski, are called to the scene. Day, a widower, whose father-in-law is the Police Commissioner of New Orleans, had an affair with Remy many years before, and although it is long over, he doesn't want to believe that she killed her husband, so he investigates. He suspects that Remy is capable of murder, because her fiance, Charles' older brother, was shot to death just before Remy left for Hollywood several years earlier. This is too much of a coincidence. The book is filled with lush descriptive passages. As, for example, when Day goes to a part of town inhabited by blacks, to find out where someone was the night of the murder, Williamson describes it thusly: In this part of town the cattails in the ditches and the black-eyed Susans that lined the road were always coated with dust. Dilapidated boathouses floated in the bayou and squatters' shacks, made of tarpaper and driftwood, perched opn the levee as if daring a good storm to come along and knock them off, Men with skin colors that ranged from brick dust to olive brown to jet blavk sat on their porches and docks, dipping home-brewed beer out of lard buckets and wondering what a white man was doing all the way to hell and gone out here, figuring it had to be bad news for some poor soul. As schoolchildren, Day, Casey Maguire, Sean O'Mara and Bridey Kinsella had gone to a voodooienne who tattooed blue stars on the inside of their wrists and said they were blood brothers, even Bridget. Now, Day was a cop, Casey was a bootlegger and criminal, Sean had been a cop also, and had been married to Bridey, but had been killed when his fishing boat was caught in a storm. Now Day is sleeping with Bridey, and the reason he went to the black part of town was to find out where his mother's washerwoman's daughter was the night of the murder, since it was known that Charles had been sleeping with Lucy, telling her that he was trying to get her husband, a friend of Day's, out of Angola, where he was serving a 50 year term for murder. The whole book is filled with conspicuous consanguinity and corruption. Everyone seems to be related to everyone else. Maeve Rourke, Daman's mother, had abandoned her family to be with her lover, Reynard Lelourie, who was Remy's father. Now Maeve lives with Day and takes care of his motherless daughter. Day goes into speakeasies and buys bootleg liquor, and why did his father-in-law allow Lucille's husband to be jailed and not executed? The lives of the residents seem to cross and recross, and the relations between the races is that of master to servant, even though this is 62 years after the end of the Civil War. Life isn't easy in the New Orleans of 1927. Apparently, the author is a well known romance writer, and this book does seem to be more romantic suspense than mystery, although there are several twists at the end. And there is something in the New Orleans air that encourages lush description. This book is worth a try.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, March 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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