Synopses & Reviews
Edgar Award-winner Julie Smith returns to the bewitching streets of New Orleans with the smartest, sassiest, hippest detective ever-the Baroness Pontalba.
Meet the snazziest P.I. in the land. Not by accident does she roam America's jazziest city, New Orleans. By day she is Talba Wallis: smart, sassy, ebony, and a fledgling detective. By night she is the Baroness Pontalba: poet laureate of the city's smoky rooms, matron saint of her town's exotic and multi-colorful café society.
Goaded into a day gig by her pushy mom, she finds herself employed by Eddie Valentino, and Talba is plunged into a world of fame, money, and power run amok, hunting a man who seduces teenage black girls and may be making them disappear. At the same time she is haunted by disturbing near-memories. Her forgotten past only emerges when violence enters her life-but not, she learns, for the first time.
Review
"[A] stroke of genius. Louisiana Hotshot is fresh, fast and touching. Just like New Orleans, [it] has a lot of 'tude, and a big heart."-
The Times-Picayune, New Orleans, LA
"Talba is one of Smith's best and boldest heroines, with a supporting entourage that alternates between making you laugh and placing a knife of fear in your spine."-The Clarion-Ledger, Jackson, MS
About the Author
Julie Smith currently lives and writes in the Faubourg Marigny district of New Orleans, a neighborhood of nightclubs, restaurants and coffee shops where shady characters mix with artists. The author of nineteen novels, she was born and raised in Savannah before escaping to the University of Mississippi. After graduation, Smith became a reporter, first for the
New Orleans Times-Picayune and later the
San Francisco Chronicle. She lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years before returning to New Orleans.
Smith abandoned reporting for writing mysteries in the early 1980s, writing a series featuring attorney Rebecca Schwartz and a second series starring Paul McDonald, a reporter turned mystery writer whose fate you wouldn't wish on a dog. A few years later, she launched a third series featuring New Orleans police detective Skip Langdon with New Orleans Mourning, which won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel in 1991. She currently alternates between writing about Skip Langdon and Talba Wallis, an African-American poet/private eye who debuted in "Louisiana Hotshot."