New Orleans Mourning
MURDER, MARDI GRAS–AND MORE SECRETS THAN BEADS…
It’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and civic leader and socialite Chauncy St. Amant has been crowned Rex, King of Carnival. But his day of glory comes to an abrupt and bloody end when a parade-goer dressed as Dolly Parton guns him down. Is the killer his aimless, promiscuous daughter Marcelle? Homosexual, mistreated son Henry? Helpless, alcoholic wife Bitty? Or some unknown player? Turns out the king had enemies…
Enter resourceful heroine Skip Langdon, a rookie police officer and former debutante turned cynic of the Uptown crowd. Scouring the streets for clues, interviewing revelers and street people with names like Jo Jo, Hinky, and Cookie, and using her white glove contacts, the post-deb rebel cop encounters a tangled web of brooding clues and ancient secrets that could mean danger for her—and doom for the St. Amants.
Axeman’s Jazz
What’s the perfect killing field for a murderer?
A place where he (or maybe she) can learn your secrets from your own mouth and then make friends over coffee. A supposedly “safe” place where anonymity is the norm. The horror who calls himself The Axeman has figured it out and claimed his territory–he’s cherry-picking his victims in the 12-Step programs of New Orleans.
And he’s had the gall to name himself after a historical serial killer. He just needs to go down, and fast, because this is New Aw’lins, dawlin’–half the town is either alcoholic or co-dependent!
Who better to take him out than tall, funny, social-misfit Skip Langdon, now a homicide detective on the Axeman team, a gig that takes her into the 12-Step groups to meet the suspects (giving author Smith a chance for gentle satire). As Skip threads her fascinated way from one self-help group to another, she finds she has more in common with the twelve-steppers than just the murder—her mother, for one thing, whom she encounters at Overeaters Anonymous! And she knows what they do not: that among their anonymous numbers is a murderous, and dangerously attractive psychopath.
Jazz Funeral
Smack in the middle of the summer, Skip finds herself investigating the stabbling death of the universally beloved producer of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Then the victim’s sixteen-year-old sister disappears, and Skip suspects that if the young woman isn’t herself the murderer, she’s in mortal danger from the person who is. And with her long-distance love, Steve Steinman, and her landlord, Jimmy Dee, to assist her, Skip trails an elusive killer through the delirium of a city caught up in the world’s most famous music bash….
Death before Facebook
Murder most viral!
In 1994, when Mark Zuckerberg was ten and this book was first published, the Internet was the fresh new face in town–who knew how dangerous it could be?
Twenty-year-old Geoff Kavanagh should never have posted about seeing his father murdered…because way too many people on the TOWN, a sort of Facebook-of-the nineties, knew things about his family he didn’t even suspect. Decades-old skeletons start falling out of closets after Geoff’s untimely death, thanks to New Orleans Detective Skip Langdon. Langdon finds Geoff’s gorgeous mom suspiciously uninterested in her son’s fatal fall. But Mom’s apparently the only one. It seems the post has gone viral. Suddenly all the TOWNSpeople have theories—and ambition as cyber-detectives. What’s a murderer to do but kill his way out?
Formerly titled “New Orleans Beat.”
House of Blues
The Edgar-winning series of New Orleans mysteries starring Skip Langdon continues. After prominenet New Orleans restauranteur Arthur Hebert is murdered, three family members suspiciously vanish. Skip’s hunt for a killer and the missing Hebert heirs embraces worlds within worlds.
The Kindness of Strangers
The sequel to House of Blues, Smith’s latest novel features the return of New Orleans police detective Skip Langdon. The upcoming mayoral election pits the the usual thugs and vipers against a Errol Jacomine, a liberal-minded, civic-spirited preacher. The trouble is, in Skip’s opinion, Jacomine is a psychopath and dangerous as hell.
Crescent City Connection
As the rich novels of Julie Smith remind us, New Orleans is a city of excess. These days the local philosophy that too much is not enough seems to encompass not only the famed Crescent City pleasures of sex, music, and food, but also the escalating horror of violent death.
However, with a new, honest police superintendent, NOPD detective Skip Langdon feels there’s hope for the city she loves. But no sooner does Superintendent Albert Good take office than he is gunned down by an assassin, and within hours the killer himself is killed. A mysterious entity calling itself The Jury claims credit for this act of vigilante justice.
Who or what is The Jury? No one knows, but Skip perceives in it the evil brilliance of her old adversary, charismatic con man and cold-blooded killer Errol Jacomine. She’s always suspected it’s just a matter of time before Jacomine’s megalomaniacal ego orchestrates his revenge.
The time is now.
From across the South, the players in the unfolding drama come together–a pretty college student on the run, a monk who has packed a lifetime’s worth of misery into a few years, and a madman with a murderous agenda.
Beautiful New Orleans gathers them all into her casual embrace, while Detective Skip Langdon races (perhaps to her own destruction) to forestall the bloodshed to come.
(Original title: Crescent City Kill)
82 Desire
Though the modern bus has long since replaced the streetcar in New Orleans, Desire is still the meanest street of them all. Now Police Detective Skip Langdon finds herself on its shady side in what at first appears to be a small case with some big names–Councilwoman Bebe Fortier has misplaced her equally prominent husband. Yet Skip soon senses something big starting to unfold. Something rooted in corruption, resulting in violence–and motivated by that old demon . . . desire.
Across town, Talba Wallis has a simple desire of her own–to find out what Russell Fortier’s disappearance has to do with her. Wallis is a woman who leads three lives–poet, computer expert, and part-time detective once hired to spy on Fortier. But the private investigator she worked for can’t help her out. He’s lying in his office with a bullet in his chest.
Reporter Jane Storey is also walking down that mean, sultry street–she’s on the brink of the biggest story of her life. But she’s got a bad feeling she’s being played like a deck of cards.
In fact, all three investigators–cop, private eye, and reporter–sense an unknown (and malevolent) presence pulling strings they cannot see.
Smith’s steamy masterpiece is a tale of desire running out of control . . . of corporate greed, a lust for power, and a legacy of misery that only now must be set right–at a cost measured in blood and heartbreak and lives.
Mean Woman Blues
Nemesis: the rival fate never allows you to beat.
The nemesis of Skip Langdon, New Orleans police detective, is Errol Jacomine. This evangelical preacher has been leader of his own frenzied army of converts, has run for mayor of New Orleans, and now wants to become president of the United States. His campaign methods are rabble-rousing, theft, kidnapping, and multiple murder.
Skip thinks he’s as dangerous as Jim Jones. She has chased him for years, no luck. Now Jacomine comes after Skip, her lover, and her friends. She must track him down. But his guise this time is so clever even his own children don’t recognize him.
In Mean Woman Blues, Edgar Award-winner Julie Smith returns triumphantly to her popular series about hip New Orleans detective Skip Langdon, once again operating in sensual, sexy, exotic New Orleans.
This time Skip is able to teach Jacomine that nemesis originally meant the goddess of retributive justice.
Murder on Magazine
SHE NEEDS A KID TO CATCH A KILLER…BUT HOW TO CATCH THE KID?
The TENTH installment of the Skip Langdon series is a New Orleans feast for the senses, a canine love story, an action-packed police procedural made-to-order for readers who like their female sleuths bold, smart, and refreshingly human. A serial killer is using Airbnb units to stage his murders, but a teenage runaway has escaped his grasp and now she’s in the wind, believing she’s killed him. Meanwhile the real killer stalks the city – and her.
Cody, the pink-haired sixteen-year-old, should be in school or at the mall texting her friends, not hanging out at the intersection of serial murder and human trafficking. When the options are: (1) Return to a life of slavery (2) Go to jail for murder (3) Be killed by a serial killer, Option 4 makes perfect sense – RUN! As mean as the streets of The City That Care Forgot can be, this child attracts angels (often unlikely ones) – and entire packs of dogs – who come to her aid.
She also finds a friend in NOPD’s newest Sergeant – big (six-foot!), beautiful, tough, and tender-hearted Skip Langdon. Skip knows her best hope of finding the killer is to find Cody – plus she feels for the girl, in whom she recognizes a younger version of her plucky, resourceful, whip-smart self. The city’s hard-boiled; the detective has a heart the size of the Superdome.
Longtime Skip Langdon fans who’ve thirsted for #10 will be delighted to hear the music of New Orleans in Smith’s prose. Fans of female-sleuth authors like Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and Linda Barnes, will love Skip Langdon’s pluck and charm. And those who particularly favor female cop stories, especially those by Nevada Barr, Lisa Gardner, Tana French, J.D. Robb, Karin Slaughter, Tess Gerritsen, and Anne Hillerman will find a new fave here.
The Big Crazy
PHONES ARE OUT AND THE CITY’S UNDER WATER—
A FIELD DAY FOR CRIMINALS! AND LOTS OF THEM ARE COPS…
August 29, 2005 – Doomsday: New Orleans is eighty per cent under water—no electricity, no phones, no 911 service, no rules. Facing the complete breakdown of systems and normality, New Orleans homicide Detective Skip Langdon is on her own to interpret and execute the only direction she’s given: Get out there and keep the peace.
With communications down and all emergency services on search and rescue, all Skip can hope to accomplish is helping the person right in front of her. More than once that person turns out to be Billy, a gutsy 15-year-old from Treme who’s in greater danger of being swamped by his chaotic home life than the Cat 5 hurricane Skip shelters him from.
When she escorts him home and discovers the scene of a possible homicide, homicide detecting must take a back seat to maintaining order—if not peace. Outrageous rumors are swirling, stirring up unrest, but what really bothers her is the one about a police department order to use the chaos as a cover for “cleaning up” by rounding up criminals and assassinating them. Now that just can’t be true. Can it?
But after she hears it for the third time, Skip teams up with the only cop in the city she’s positive she can trust, her former partner, movie-star handsome, kickass, praline-sweet Adam Abasolo. They may not be able to fix everything, but, as the bodies pile up, they are damn sure going to hit back at the guys who’re giving their department a black eye.
On any regular weekday, New Orleans lives up to its billing as The Big Crazy. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where the dirty cops and lunatics are running the asylum, author Julie Smith also takes us inside the actual asylum, Charity Hospital emergency psych unit, an unexpected oasis of comfort in stark contrast to endless amounts of ever-present filthy water and hordes of half-drowned people.
Smith strikes just the right note, capturing the massive tragedy of the events and the inevitable comedy as the survivors struggle to make sense of the closest thing to hell squared that any of them has ever seen.
Mystery fans who love hard-boiled women sleuths, lots of action and adventure, and offbeat police procedurals will love Detective Skip Langdon.
My Take
I read the first 9 books in the series a loooooooong time ago. I had no idea there were two more out there until recently, so I picked those up too. I love the main character, Skip Langdon. She feels real, like I could run into her on the street in New Orleans. I get a great sense of place and I like the mix of secondary characters too. Just a good series with a lot of compassion, humor, and local flavor.
Note: The action in book #11 takes place before book #10. If I’d known that before I read them, I would have read #11 first.