JAZZ ROYALTY, MEAN STREETS, AND ... MURDER! The troubled heir of a great New Orleans musical legacy has been gunned down. The writer who researched his obituary has met a sudden death. Coincidence?Or did he know too much? The Big Easy’s premier jazz singer, Queenie Feran, thinks there’s more to it than an accidental overdose, and she hires PI and poet Talba Wallis—AKA the Baroness de Pontalba—to uncover the truth. The Baroness rubs elbows with jazz royalty, sounding them out for clues and swaddling the reader in New Orleans ambience, before she takes to the mean streets to uncover the victim’s secret life. WHO WILL LIKE IT: This short story will appeal to fans of Talba, the smart, sassy, African American computer wiz who's also a gifted poet and detective, and Julie Smith’s other New Orleans detective, Skip Langdon. (As well as authors of female PI series like Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, Linda Barnes, and Laura Lippman; and intrepid African-American female protagonists like Jackie Brown, Christie Love, Anita Van Buren on Law and Order, Whoopi Goldberg’s unexpected Bernie Rhodenbarr, not to mention the incomparable Olivia Pope of Scandal.) Bottom line: Expect a kickass African-American female detective—with the soul of a poet!