![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/Devil.jpg\" "\\"Devil\\"")
<\/a>In his excellent police procedural series set in New Orleans, Bill Loehfelm pours into his narrative all he has soaked up while living there. He has a sharp eye, and sharper pen, for all the detail that makes New Orleans \u2014 well, New Orleans. From dicey uptown neighborhoods, hear \u201c\u2026the whine of an ambulance headed down Napoleon Avenue, the imitative howl of a dog in a nearby yard, the long, deep note from a ship on the river.\u201d\u00a0 Down on Frenchmen Street, \u201cthe dusky crown of an oddball neighborhood called the Marign. \u2026 Fedora-topped hipster poets smoking hand-rolled cigarettes perched typewriters on folding cocktail tables, scratching their beards and tapping out poetry on demand, hoping for enough in cash donations to cover their next round.\u201d\u00a0 With a splash of sound here, a splatter of color there, he does New Orleans as well as anyone writing today.<\/p>\nHe doesn\u2019t just know New Orleans, however; he knows how to use it. In his hands, the Crescent City becomes more than a setting. It becomes a major character that carries on\u00a0a vibrant relationship with his cast of players, bringing out their best and worst, their hopes and dreams, and of course, their darkest secrets.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, the dialogue helps the reader size up someone, like his hero, Maureen Coughlin. When she stops for a moment on a call, she calculates her chances in relation to \u201c\u2026the fifty people, most of them men, drunk, high, some them armed, between her and the corner. She was a cop \u2026 but she was also five-four and 120 pounds. Outnumbered and outgunned.\u201d\u00a0 When she stops at a local diner, the St. Charles Tavern that \u201c\u2026smelled of old kitchen grease, moldy air-conditioning, and cheap ketchup,\u201d\u00a0we get more than just atmosphere, we get an insight into Maureen herself:\u00a0 The Tavern \u201c\u2026served their coffee the way she liked it, old and burned. Or as she liked to tell her coworkers, hot, black and bitter like her heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
A displaced Yankee, Maureen has a tough time adapting to the corrupt cop culture of the sleazy Big Easy post-Katrina. Quick to anger, slow to catch on, she finds herself constantly in situations she can\u2019t talk about, and conversations she can\u2019t tell anyone about. Loehfelm\u2019s dialogue has the tension of real cops talking, not characters served up to act out a story. For Maureen, there\u2019s no black and white, just hundreds of shades of gray.<\/p>\n
In this third installment, she\u2019s still tracking the murderer from the second book when she stumbles into a complicated plot that carries her from street people to uptown posh parties to a Mississippi militia. She gets so caught up that both a criminal and a possible informant accuse her of Doing The Devil\u2019s Work<\/em>. Although she has a strong moral compass, some of her other parts need repair. By the time she ends up waist deep in the Mississippi, she has sunk even deeper into the corruption of the local culture. Perhaps Loehfelm will let her take the detective\u2019s test so she can pull herself out of the muck in the next installment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s always a happy occasion when Bob Moyer returns from one of his journeys ready to tell us about the books he\u2019s been reading. Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer DOING THE DEVIL\u2019S WORK. By Bill Loehfelm. Farrar Straus Giroux. 308 pages. $26. In his excellent police procedural series set in New Orleans, Bill Loehfelm pours […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[590,5],"tags":[694,696,695],"class_list":["post-1651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-detective-fiction-mysteries","category-mysteries","tag-leohfelm","tag-new-orleans","tag-police-procedurals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1651"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1653,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1651\/revisions\/1653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}