Lost River

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The next heart-pounding chapter in Fulmer’s Storyville series featuring New Orleans detective Valentin St. Cyr Autumn 1913. Valentin St. Cyr has been absent from his Storyville stomping grounds for some months, trying to make it in the straight detective world and make a go of it with his longtime love, Justine. But then a man is found dead in a Storyville brothel.The madam immediately turns to the creole detective for help.He resists, but when several more bodies turn up in Storyville, Valentin can’t help but come to the aid of the place—and the people—he tried to leave behind.Just when he has the case wrapped around his finger, it turns out Valentin has been played.The police captain thinks he’s meddling and may be guilty of murder.He’s on the run, and Justine has turned her back on him, retaliating with a handsome young fellow in a very sporty car. But is she being lured into a trap too?Taking us back to his acclaimed and much-loved Storyville series, in Lost River award-winning author David Fulmer marks a heart-pounding return to the streets of early-1900s New Orleans. From Publishers WeeklyIn Shamus-winner Fulmer's enjoyable fourth mystery to feature Valentin St. Cyr (after 2006's Rampart Street), the Creole detective must stop a crime wave in Storyville, New Orleans' legendary red-light district, in 1913. St. Cyr, who's been working for a respectable law firm in a better part of town, reluctantly decides to help his former employer, Tom Anderson (aka the king of Storyville), after a dead man with a bullet hole in his chest turns up in the parlor of one of Anderson's bordellos. Enter the contender for queen of Storyville, Evelyne Dallencort, a jaded society matron and her equally jaded young lover, Louis Jacob, and the body count rises. With his usual lucid prose, Fulmer details the grubby crib life that exploited scores of women prostitutes while padding rich men's wallets. At times, though, the cartoonish Dallencort sounds too much like a modern woman who's wandered into the wrong book. Still, those looking for some jazzy early 20th-century chills won't be disappointed. (Jan.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistAfter two stand-alones, Fulmer returns to his Valentin St. Cyr series, set in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. St. Cyr, the Creole detective, has sworn off his life as a fixer for Storyville boss Tom Anderson, hoping to cement his relationship with former prostitute Justine. Then bodies start turning up around Storyville’s high-class brothels, and St. Cyr is drawn back into his old life. But are the murders only catnip to lure the Creole into a deadly trap? Fulmer tends to rework familiar themes—St. Cyr’s determination to escape Storyville, for example—but his feel for atmosphere and his increasingly subtle hand with character development keep the series from going stale. The latter is particularly evident this time in Fulmer’s more rounded portrayals of the aging Anderson, his run as de facto mayor of Storyville nearly over, and the steel-willed Justine, the one-time prostitute determined to find a new life, even it means giving up St. Cyr. Early on, this series’ main appeal was its setting, but now it can hold its own with the most character-driven of historical mysteries. --Bill Ott