National Network for Equitable Library Service

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 is a familiar enemy, returned to settle an old score, or has Richards faked the kidnapping to further some aim of his own? The desperate mother turns to the one person who might help her: old boyfriend Wesley Farrell. Farrell, a Creole club owner passing for white, freshly returned from a self-imposed exile to Havana, prowls the city’s bars and streets, familiarizing himself with a growing list of Richards’s enemies while he tries to decide which of them might have the brains and guts to stage a coup against the corrupt councilman. Meanwhile, Negro Squad Sergeant Israel Daggett searches for the sole witness to the kidnapping, young black custodian Skeeter Longbaugh, unaware that the kidnappers have sent Easter Coupi, the most feared killer in the Negro underworld, after Skeeter. This new entry into an atmospheric, well-reviewed noir series follows Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, Blood to Drink (list as Best of 2000 by January magazine), and Pale Shadow.