Julie Smith Books In Order

Tourist Trap

Lawyer sleuth Rebecca Schwartz heads to an Easter morning sunrise service and gets the shock of her life when she sees a real body nailed to the cross. Rebecca learns the man was a tourist. And he’s only the first to die. A man identifying himself as the Trapper is out to destroy San Francisco’s tourist trade by killing visitors. But when the cops arrest an innocent man as the Trapper, Rebecca takes on an impossible defense and goes undercover to find a killer…

Other People’s Skeletons

‘Nobody gets inside her characters like Julie Smith.’Linda BarnesWhen Rebecca Schwartz learns that her best friend and legal partner Chris Nicholson is accused of murder and won’t give an alibi, Rebecca gets curious. To her amazement, Rebecca finds that her partner has a secret life and so did the victim, dashing critic Jason McKendrick. For that matter, so does everyone else in the case, causing Rebecca to wonder what planet she’s stumbled onto. One thing she knows with certainty: She has to shake some skeletons from the closets and fast or Chris is going to prison…
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True-Life Adventure

Mystery novelist Paul McDonald is forced into the role of detective when his private eye boss is murdered and his own home is broken into and set aflame. Reissue. K.

Huckleberry Fiend

When a burglar discovers an original manuscript for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the closet of a stewardess who later turns up dead, he decides to join forces with Paul McDonald to solve the mystery. Reissue. NYT.

New Orleans Mourning

When the smiling King of Carnival is killed at Mardi Gras, policewoman Skip Langdon is on the case. She knows the upper crust family of the victim and that it hides more than its share of glittering skeletons. But nothing could prepare her for the tangled web of clues and ancient secrets that would mean danger for her and doom for the St. Amants…
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‘Smith is a gifted writer.’

THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

The Axeman’s Jazz

‘Julie Smith not only firmly establishes her claim to the New Orleans crime scene, but she explores an intriguing new franchise for the serial killer.’
Sue Grafton
For detective Skip Langdon, the murder of a multiple self help group member is no fun. Even if the guilty character is claiming the mantle last held by the Axeman, a notorious New Orleans serial killer of seventy years ago. Yet 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. And she knows what they do not: that among their anonymous numbers is a deadly murderous, and dangerously attractive psychopath…
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From the Paperback edition.

Jazz Funeral

‘A genuinely moving mystery…
It’s always a pleasure to spend time with Skip, a no nonsense, level headed hero*ine in a wild and reckless city.’THE BALTIMORE SUNSmack 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…
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House of Blues

‘ONE OF THE BEST OF THE SKIP LANGDON SERIES…
In the fast growing field of fictional female police officers, New Orleans Homicide Detective Skip Langdon stands tall.’ St. Louis Post DispatchAfter prominent New Orleans restaurateur Arthur Hebert is murdered in his beautiful Garden District home, three family members suspiciously vanish: Hebert’s daughter, who was soon to have taken over the management of his restaurant, his ex addict son in law, and his small granddaughter all missing without a trace. A kidnapping gone wrong? Homicide Detective Skip Langdon thinks it’s possible, but why should the kidnappers have taken three hostages when one would have been enough? Skip’s hunt for a murderer and the missing Hebert heirs embraces worlds within worlds the elegant, dangerous Garden District, the French Quarter, the seedy Treme, broken down projects, exclusive mansions, and lowdown bars. It takes her into places where the city’s dirty business is transacted, and those where life is mostly madness, sadness, and badness. It may even take Skip to her death…
. ‘SMITH BRINGS THE CITY STRIKINGLY ALIVE.’ The Boston Sunday Globe

The Kindness of Strangers

Julie Smith’s New Orleans is not a city, it’s a world exotic, sweetly perverse, dangerously seductive. Nowhere else does politics make stranger bedfellows; and the approaching mayoral election is stranger than most, pitting the usual thugs and vipers against a seeming breath of fresh air Errol Jacomine, a liberal minded, civic spirited preacher. The only problem is, in the opinion of Police Detective Skip Langdon, Jacomine is a psychopath and dangerous as hell. On leave of absence from the police force, Skip becomes obsessed with exposing the frightening figure beneath Jacomine’s good guy image. Immediately, an anonymous army of spies and hatchet men go to work on her, and Skip begins to understand that in opposing Jacomine, she is risking not only her livelihood but her sanity and possibly the lives of people she loves. Skip’s instincts seem confirmed when the only witness to Jacomine’s crimes turns up dead. Skip thinks there are more bodies buried in Jacomine’s past, but it’s the present she’s worried about. And protecting one of her own against the preacher’s evil sends Skip to the dark center of bayou country, where even the elements are her enemy. A deadly chase through the swamp during a fierce hurricane forces Skip to rely not on The Kindness of Strangers but on her own inner strength to survive. No other novelist so brilliantly sustains the mood of ominous tension or raises the heat index as Julie Smith does in her Skip Langdon novels. Of them all, The Kindness of Strangers tears most fiercely at the heart.

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. From the Hardcover edition.

Mean Woman Blues / Boneyard Blues

A Skip Langdon Novel

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.

Louisiana Hotshot

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 caf 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.

Louisiana Bigshot

A Talba Wallis Novel

By night the glamorous Baroness de Pontalba, by day New Orleans hippest P.I., Talba Wallis is dumbfounded when she can t do a simple background check on an old friend Babalu Maya just doesn t seem to exist on paper. Four days later, she doesn t exist at all.

As Talba threads her way backward through Babalu’s short, difficult life, she finds an intricate pattern of violence and fear, and a shadowy Mr. Big with homicidal intent. Talba butts right into everybody s business in Clayton, Louisiana, a small town with a big, ugly secret, where being black, mouthy, and smart are the three qualities most likely to get her killed. As she uncovers dark truths, events and people spiral into nasty motion in a story that has more twists and turns than the Mississippi River.

Louisiana Lament

Allyson Brown, the Girl Gatsby, is a woman of wealth, hostess of fabled parties, patron of the arts especially of poets. Found floating in her own swimming pool, shot to death.

Poet and fledgling detective Talba Wallis gets an urgent call from the sister she barely knows: Janessa. To Girl Gatsby Janessa is close friend. But this call isn’t an invitation to an elegant literary salon. Janessa wants off the hook as the principal murder suspect.

Investigating, Talba and her irascible boss, Eddie, find the reality behind the Gatsby glamour. Allyson was widely hated, a con artist who neglected her children, failed to pay her bills, and lied to everyone she wanted something from. The one person she loved may have ushered her to her death.

The case takes Talba and Eddie from literary parties to Gulf Coast bait shops, from biker bars to abandoned wharves, and finally, to the story of another Gatsby, which may yield answers, or greater mysteries.

Louisiana Lament is Talba’s journey through the not so genteel Southern literary scene, where backbiting and petty jealousies abound, and mint juleps are served with canap’s of carnage.

P.I. on a Hot Tin Roof

When PI Talba Wallis gets a frantic phone call from Orleans Parish Prison, the last person she expects to hear from is her boss’s lawyer daughter, Angie. Popped for drug possession, Angie insists the drugs were planted. She’s a target for representing a neighborhood group protesting the illegal commercial use of a marina by its owner, Judge Buddy Champagne. According to Angie, the judge is dirty and he’s the one who had her set up. Talba and her boss, Eddie, are outraged knowing Angie as they do, they pull out all the stops for her. And when Talba goes undercover as a housekeeper for Judge Champagne, she finds a household straight out of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with the judge playing Big Daddy. The weak son and the hot daughter in law are in residence, being ‘between jobs.’ Big Mama’s absent, though she died some time ago, and the judge is now adding his fianc e to the mix. That would be Miss Kristin LaGarde, an impossibly lovely, and possibly innocent, young lady who seems hopelessly in love with the old coot. Talba dredges up lots of interesting material; such as that someone was accidentally electrocuted at the marina and that the judge is in bed with certain bail bondsmen. She finds evidence of bribes and kickbacks. He’s dirty all right. When the story breaks and the scandal deepens, Judge Champagne winds up dead. And, to her surprise, Talba is asked to investigate. Did politics kill the judge? Or was it his own family?

Bronx Noir (By:S J Rozan)

Brand new stories by: Thomas Adcock, Kevin Baker, Thomas Bentil, Lawrence Block, Jerome Charyn, Suzanne Chazin, Terrence Cheng, Ed Dee, Joanne Dobson, Robert Hughes, Marlon James, Sandra Kitt, Rita Laken, Miles Marshall Lewis, Pat Picciarelli, Abraham Rodriguez Jr., S.J. Rozan, Steven Torres, and Joe Wallace.

S.J. Rozan was born and raised in the Bronx and is a lifelong New Yorker. She’s the author of eight novels in the Lydia Chin/Bill Smith series, and of the stand alones Absent Friends and In This Rain forthcoming. Her books have won Edgar, Nero, Macavity, and Shamus awards for best novel. She’s at work on another series novel, Shanghai Moon.

Chicago Noir (By:)

Chicago Noir is a legitimate heir to the noble literary tradition of the greatest city in America. Nelson Algren and James Farrell would be proud. Stephen Elliott, author of Happy Baby If ever a city was made to be the home of noir, it’s Chicago. These writers go straight to Chicago s noir heart. Aleksandar Hemon, author of Nowhere ManBrand new stories by: Neal Pollack, Achy Obejas, Alexai Galaviz Budziszewski, Adam Langer, Joe Meno, Peter Orner, Kevin Guilfoile, Bayo Ojikutu, Jeff Allen, Luciano Guerriero, Claire Zulkey, Andrew Ervin, M.K. Meyers, Todd Dills, C.J. Sullivan, Daniel Buckman, Amy Sayre Roberts, and Jim Arndorfer. The city of Chicago has spent much time and money over the last decade marketing itself as a tourist friendly place for the whole family. It’s got a shiny new Millennium Park, a spaceship in the middle of Soldier Field, and thousands of identical faux brick condo buildings that seem to spring from the ground overnight. Chicago’s rough and tumble tough guy reputation has been replaced by a postcard with a lake view. But that city’s not gone. The hard bitten streets once represented by James Farrell and Nelson Algren may have shifted locales, and they may be populated by different ethnicities, but Chicago is still a place where people struggle to survive and where, for many, crime is the only means for their survival. The stories in Chicago Noir reclaim that territory. Chicago Noir is populated by hired killers and jazzmen, drunks and dreamers, corrupt cops and ticket scalpers and junkies. It’s the Chicago that the Department of Tourism doesn’t want you to see, a place where hard cases face their sad fates, and pay for their sins in blood. These are stories about blocks that visitors are afraid to walk. They tell of a Chicago beyond Oprah, Michael Jordan, and deep dish pizza. This isn’t someone’s dream of Chicago. It’s not even a nightmare. It’s just the real city, unfiltered. Chicago Noir.

Baltimore Noir (By:Laura Lippman)

Brand new stories by: David Simon, Laura Lippman, Tim Co*ckey, Rob Hiaasen, Robert Ward, Sujata Massey, Jack Bludis, Rafael Alvarez, Marcia Talley, Joseph Wallace, Lisa Respers France, Charlie Stella, Sarah Weinman, Dan Fesperman, Jim Fusilli, and Ben Neihart.

Laura Lippman has lived in Baltimore most of her life and she would have spent even more time there if the editors of the Sun had agreed to hire her earlier. She attended public schools and has lived in several of the city’s distinctive neighborhoods, including Dickeyville, Tuscany Canterbury, Evergreen, and South Federal Hill.

Los Angeles Noir (By:Denise Hamilton)

Brand new stories by: Michael Connelly, Janet Fitch, Susan Straight, Hector Tobar, Patt Morrison, Robert Ferrigno, Gary Phillips, Christopher Rice, Naomi Hirahara, Jim Pascoe, Scott Phillips, Diana Wagman, Lienna Silver, Brian Ascalon Roley, and Denise Hamilton. Denise Hamilton writes the Eve Diamond series. Her books have been shortlisted for the Edgar, Macavity, Anthony, and Willa Cather awards. The Los Angeles Times named Last Lullaby a Best Book of 2004, and it was also a USA Today Summer Pick and a finalist for a Southern California Booksellers Association 2004 award. Her fourth Eve Diamond novel, Savage Garden, is a Los Angeles Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Southern California Booksellers Association award for Best Mystery of 2005.

Wall Street Noir (By:Peter Spiegelman)

Brand new stories by: John Burdett, Peter Blauner, Charles Ardai, Henry Blodget, Twist Phelan, Larry Light, James Hime, Jason Starr, Lauren Sanders, Tim Broderick, Reed Farrel Coleman, Jim Fusilli, Mark Haskell Smith, and more.

Peter Spiegelman is the Shamus Award winning author of Black Maps Knopf, 2003, Death’s Little Helpers Knopf, 2005, and Red Cat Knopf, 2007, which feature private detective and Wall Street refugee John March. Spiegelman is a twenty year veteran of the financial services and software industries, and has worked with banks, brokerage houses, and central banks in major markets around the world. He lives in Connecticut.

Mexico City Noir (By:Paco Ignacio Taibo II)

Brand new stories by: Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Eugenio Aguirre, Eduardo Antonia Parra, Bernardo Fern ndez Bef, scar de la Borbolla, Rolo D ez, Victor Luiz Gonz lez, F.G. Haghenbeck, Juan Hern ndez Luna, Myriam Laurini, Eduardo Monteverde, and Julia Rodr guez. Paco Ignacio Taibo II was born in Gij n, Spain, and has lived in Mexico since 1958. He is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, which have been published in many languages around the world, including a mystery series starring Mexican Private Investigator H ctor Belascoar n Shayne. He is a professor of history at the Metropolitan University of Mexico City.

Haiti Noir (By:Edwidge Danticat)

Includes brand new stories by: Edwidge Danticat, Rodney Saint Eloi, Madison Smartt Bell, Gary Victor, M.J. Fi vre, Marvin Victor, Yanick Lahens, Louis Philipe Dalembert, Kettly Mars, Marie Ketsia Theodore Pharel, Evelyne Trouillot, Katia Ulysse, Ibi Aanu Zoboi, Nadine Pinede, and others. Haiti has a tragic history and continues to be one of the most destitute places on the planet, especially in the aftermath of the earthquake. Here, however, Edwidge Danticat reveals that even while the subject matter remains dark, the caliber of Haitian writing is of the highest order.

A Poison That Leaves No Trace: With Mystery Jigsaw Puzzle

Four new titles based on original short stories written by international best selling authors: Carol Higgins Clark, Nelson DeMille, Sue Grafton, and Julie Smith. Read the short story, assemble the 1,000 piece puzzle, and discover the hidden clues. Then solve the mystery by putting together the pieces in the story and in the puzzle. Slick, book like packaging and high quality artwork make these puzzles a standout. Beware: the 1,000 piece puzzle is different from the cover!

I’d Kill For That

New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Crusie teams up with USA Today bestselling author Bob Mayer to write a sizzling, high octane romantic adventure about a straight talking woman and a straight shooting man
Lucy Armstrong is a director of television commercials who’s just been recruited to finish a four day action movie shoot. But she arrives on the set to discover that the directing staff has quit, the make up artist is suicidal, the stars are egomaniacs, the stunt director is her ex husband, and the lead actor has just acquired as an advisor a Green Beret who has the aggravating habit of always being right.

Green Beret Captain JT Wilder had thought that hiring on as a military consultant for a movie star was a good deal: easy money and easier starlets. Instead he has to babysit a bumbling comedian, dodge low flying helicopters, and resist his attraction to a director who bears a distracting resemblance to Wonder Woman. Then the CIA calls and he realizes that somebody is taking shooting a movie much too literally.
Full of suspense and humor, non stop action and fast paced dialogue, Don’t Look Down is the perfect blend of male and female, adventure and romance, Mayer and Crusie.

Men of the Mean Streets: Gay Noir

Noir has always been one of the most popular and darkest sub genres of the mystery field. Following in the footsteps of such masters of the form as James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett, some of the top writers of gay mystery explore this territory of amoral tough guys with a cynical view of the world by giving classic noir a gay twist. Edited by award winning author/editors Greg Herren and J.M. Redmann, Men of the Mean Streets changes the face of gay mystery and the reader may never look at gay life and culture in the same way again.

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe

Authorized by the estate of the late Raymond Chandler, this volume reveals the missing life history and detective adventures of Philip Marlowe, one of the 20th century’s most enduring and beloved characters. Marlowe is the quintessential American detective: cynical yet idealistic; romantic yet full of despair; a gentleman capable of rough violence. The final story in the volume is Raymond Chandler’s last Marlowe adventure:The Pencil. The stories run chronologically through the career of Marlowe, from 1935 through 1960. These are classic Marlowe tales of betrayal, mistrust, and double dealing on the seamy side of Los Angeles.