Conspiracy in the Crescent City

Jerry Malone can't go home again. After he escapes Hurricane Katrina, he lives in Manhattan wearing mismatched suits and making mismatched relationships, longing for a redux. When a rich New Orleans heiress hires wisecracking and world-weary Jerry for a case, he returns to his Crescent City. Jerry and the heiress need to find out what happened to a mutual friend who is missing and perhaps dead in the city. Searching the city, he watches it rise from mud, oil, and ashes, and possibilities of his personal redemption reveal themselves. Working in scandal-ridden New Orleans, a city notable for continually rebuilding from The Big Blow and other disasters both social and material, Malone begins to rebuild a failed career and relationship. A tarnished attorney turned detective, he battles the destructive forces of New Orleans' corruption and post-Katrina disintegration. He uncovers and derails a plot by a Saudi native to kill candidates for president by using the New Orleans Museum of Art and an unsuspecting kinetic artist as his tools. Malone's challenge is to save the artist, the city, and himself in a novel framed by post-Katrina confusion, international espionage, murder and violence shrouded in an atmosphere of jaded jazz joints and a city filled with half-failed resurrections and funky characters. The character-driven plot involves crime, terrorism, sex and the quirks and struggles of the post-Katrina social milieu.