Murder, Ghosts and Ripped Bodices in the Swinging South

Mardi Gras seems to have arrived a few months early for three authors who’ve set their novels in or about the city of New Orleans. “Midnight Bayou” (Putnam, $25.95, 352 pages), the new bestseller by Nora Roberts, follows the travails of a Boston lawyer named Declan Fitzgerald who, on a whim, dumps his practice and his fiancee and heads for sultry, swampy Louisiana to buy a broken-down gothic mansion he’s always fancied.

As if restoring a crumbling three-story edifice were not difficult enough, poor Declan also has to put up with ghosts who have been hanging around the third floor intermittently for a hundred years, ever since the beautiful Abigail Manet was murdered there by her brother-in-law. Complicating our hero’s dilettantish life even more, he’s fallen head over heels for a local barmaid named Angelina Simone. Wouldn’t you just know she’d be distantly related to Abigail?

The book is billed as “romantic suspense,” but, as befitting an author whom Booklist calls “the reigning Queen of Romance,” suspense is in short supply, even shorter if you don’t buy the ghost guff. There’s enough thrusting and pulsating to satisfy readers who like a good vicarious, um, love story. It’s all pretty much by-the-numbers sultry, spooky stuff, though Roberts does pull off an interesting stereotype switcheroo by having Declan be the one smitten and in jeopardy, while Angelina is the commitment-hating, independent one who does the saving.

Another lawyer decides to settle down in Dixie in Julie Garwood’s “Mercy” (Simon & Schuster, $25, 416 pages). Theo Buchanan is a tough Justice Department attorney who arrives in New Orleans to address a convention and winds up literally as well as figuratively falling for a beautiful and brilliant surgeon, Dr. Michelle Renard.

Garwood has concocted an original “meet cute” for them: Buchanan is stricken with appendicitis and throws up all over the doctor’s newly purchased expensive gown.

In spite of the fact that her dress is totaled, she performs a speedy operation that saves his life.

He’s so love-struck, he follows her to her home town of Bowen, La., where he’s given the opportunity to even the score--lifesaving-wise.

It seems the members of the Sowing Circle, a ring of Crescent City socialite-thieves, through a series of coincidence-laden turns, are convinced that the doctor is about to tumble to their secret as well as the location of their vast stash in the Cayman Islands. They immediately set out to shut her up. The result is a moderately effective, if improbable, thriller interrupted by considerable feverish romance of a much more inventive nature than may be found in Roberts’ tome.

You’ll find no visiting lawyers in David Fulmer’s “Chasing the Devil’s Tail” (Poisoned Pen Press, $24.95, 269 pages), nor any bodice-ripping romance.

Instead, readers will have to make do with a beautifully constructed, elegantly presented time trip to a New Orleans of the very early 1900s, when the city was alive with the music of Buddy Bolden and Ferdinand Le Menthe, a.k.a. Jellyroll Morton, and the red lights of Storyville burned brightly.

Valentin St. Cyr, the novel’s protagonist, is a Creole private detective in the employ of the boss of Storyville, Tom Anderson. It’s his job to keep the houses of ill repute and gambling dens quiet enough to satisfy the New Orleans gentry without interfering with the operation of the city’s police force. It’s a narrow path to trod, but St. Cyr is clever and resourceful enough to get the job done until a surrogate Jack the Ripper begins to dispatch ladies of the evening.

The detective’s problem is that Bolden, his boyhood pal, is the most likely suspect.

Lost in a world of booze and drugs, the legendary jazzman is a powerful presence as he rambles through the plot on his way to an asylum at Jackson, La. Thanks (or no thanks) primarily to E.L. Doctorow, it’s commonplace for novels to mix fictional and actual characters these days. Often the effect seems forced or precious. Not here.

Bolden, Morton, Anderson, the deformed photographer E.J. Bellocq and a gallery of the city’s more infamous madams are vividly re-created and smartly integrated into the story.

One particularly memorable sequence describes Bolden’s musical interruption of a funeral procession for one of the Black Rose Killer’s victims.

“The black-clad first-line marchers continued to ignore him.... Bolden took no notice, zigzagging behind them on juking legs, delighting the second-liners and upsetting the marchers all the more. His horn flew above their heads like a bird flushed from the grass and his loud, dirty wave sound washed right over their tidy noses.”

The mystery is a good one, satisfyingly resolved. The characters are memorable and the period is brilliantly recaptured. If Fulmer, a documentary film producer, has plans for future stories about St. Cyr and his real and imaginary Fourth Ward cronies, they’d be more than welcome here.

*

Dick Lochte, the author of “Lucky Dog and Other Tales of Murder” (Five Star) and the prize-winning novel, “Sleeping Dog” (Poisoned Pen Press), reviews mysteries every other week.