MURDER, MARDI GRAS—AND MORE SECRETS THAN BEADS... It's Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and civic leader and socialite Chauncy St. Amant has been crowned Rex, King of Carnival. But his day of glory comes to an abrupt and bloody end when a parade-goer dressed as Dolly Parton guns him down. Is the killer his aimless, promiscuous daughter Marcelle? Homosexual, mistreated son Henry? Helpless, alcoholic wife Bitty? Or some unknown player? Turns out the king had enemies... Enter resourceful heroine Skip Langdon, a rookie police officer and former debutante turned cynic of the Uptown crowd. Scouring the streets for clues, interviewing revelers and street people with names like Jo Jo, Hinky, and Cookie, and using her white glove contacts, the post-deb rebel cop encounters a tangled web of brooding clues and ancient secrets that could mean danger for her—and doom for the St. Amants.

ASIN B007YCEW10 moved to the most recent edition What’s the perfect killing field for a murderer? A place where he (or maybe she) can learn your secrets from your own mouth and then make friends over coffee. A supposedly "safe" place where anonymity is the norm. The horror who calls himself The Axeman has figured it out and claimed his territory—he's cherry-picking his victims in the 12-Step programs of New Orleans. And he's had the gall to name himself after a historical serial killer. He just needs to go down, and fast, because this is New Aw'lins, dawlin'—half the town is either alcoholic or co-dependent! Who better to take him out than tall, funny, social-misfit Skip Langdon, now a homicide detective on the Axeman team, a gig that takes her into the 12-Step groups to meet the suspects (giving author Smith a chance for gentle satire). 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—her mother, for one thing, whom she encounters at Overeaters Anonymous! And she knows what they do not: that among their anonymous numbers is a murderous, and dangerously attractive psychopath.

ASIN B00817OUCS moved to the most recent edition "A genuinely moving mystery...It's always a pleasure to spend time with Skip, a no-nonsense, level-headed heroine in a wild and reckless city." THE BALTIMORE SUN Smack 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....

ASIN B008DP2B56 moved to the most recent edition Murder most viral! In 1994, when Mark Zuckerberg was ten and this book was first published, the Internet was the fresh new face in town—who knew how dangerous it could be? Twenty-year-old Geoff Kavanagh should never have posted about seeing his father murdered…because way too many people on the TOWN, a sort of Facebook-of-the nineties, knew things about his family he didn’t even suspect. Decades-old skeletons start falling out of closets after Geoff’s untimely death, thanks to New Orleans Detective Skip Langdon. Langdon finds Geoff’s gorgeous mom suspiciously uninterested in her son’s fatal fall. But Mom’s apparently the only one. It seems the post has gone viral. Suddenly all the TOWNSpeople have theories—and ambition as cyber-detectives. What’s a murderer to do but kill his way out? Formerly titled "New Orleans Beat."

ASIN B008NOY09W moved to the most recent edition The Edgar-winning series of New Orleans mysteries starring Skip Langdon continues. After prominenet New Orleans restauranteur Arthur Hebert is murdered, three family members suspiciously vanish. Skip's hunt for a killer and the missing Hebert heirs embraces worlds within worlds. HC: Fawcett.

The sequel to House of Blues, Smith's latest novel features the return of New Orleans police detective Skip Langdon. The upcoming mayoral election pits the the usual thugs and vipers against a Errol Jacomine, a liberal-minded, civic-spirited preacher. The trouble is, in Skip's opinion, Jacomine is a psychopath and dangerous as hell.

As the rich novels of Julie Smith remind us, New Orleans is a city of excess. These days the local philosophy that too much is not enough seems to encompass not only the famed Crescent City pleasures of sex, music, and food, but also the escalating horror of violent death. However, with a new, honest police superintendent, NOPD detective Skip Langdon feels there's hope for the city she loves. But no sooner does Superintendent Albert Good take office than he is gunned down by an assassin, and within hours the killer himself is killed. A mysterious entity calling itself The Jury claims credit for this act of vigilante justice. Who or what is The Jury? No one knows, but Skip perceives in it the evil brilliance of her old adversary, charismatic con man and cold-blooded killer Errol Jacomine. She's always suspected it's just a matter of time before Jacomine's megalomaniacal ego orchestrates his revenge. The time is now. From across the South, the players in the unfolding drama come together—a pretty college student on the run, a monk who has packed a lifetime's worth of misery into a few years, and a madman with a murderous agenda. Beautiful New Orleans gathers them all into her casual embrace, while Detective Skip Langdon races (perhaps to her own destruction) to forestall the bloodshed to come.

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.

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.

PHONES ARE OUT AND THE CITY’S UNDER WATER—A FIELD DAY FOR CRIMINALS! AND LOTS OF THEM ARE COPS… August 29, 2005 - Doomsday: New Orleans is eighty per cent under water—no electricity, no phones, no 911 service, no rules. Facing the complete breakdown of systems and normality, New Orleans homicide Detective Skip Langdon is on her own to interpret and execute the only direction she’s given: Get out there and keep the peace. With communications down and all emergency services on search and rescue, all Skip can hope to accomplish is helping the person right in front of her. More than once that person turns out to be Billy, a gutsy 15-year-old from Treme who’s in greater danger of being swamped by his chaotic home life than the Cat 5 hurricane Skip shelters him from. When she escorts him home and discovers the scene of a possible homicide, homicide detecting must take a back seat to maintaining order—if not peace. Outrageous rumors are swirling, stirring up unrest, but what really bothers her is the one about a police department order to use the chaos as a cover for “cleaning up” by rounding up criminals and assassinating them. Now that just can’t be true. Can it? But after she hears it for the third time, Skip teams up with the only cop in the city she’s positive she can trust, her former partner, movie-star handsome, kickass, praline-sweet Adam Abasolo. They may not be able to fix everything, but, as the bodies pile up, they are damn sure going to hit back at the guys who’re giving their department a black eye. On any regular weekday, New Orleans lives up to its billing as The Big Crazy. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where the dirty cops and lunatics are running the asylum, author Julie Smith also takes us inside the actual asylum, Charity Hospital emergency psych unit, an unexpected oasis of comfort in stark contrast to endless amounts of ever-present filthy water and hordes of half-drowned people. Smith strikes just the right note, capturing the massive tragedy of the events and the inevitable comedy as the survivors struggle to make sense of the closest thing to hell squared that any of them has ever seen. Mystery fans who love hard-boiled women sleuths, lots of action and adventure, and offbeat police procedurals will love Detective Skip Langdon.

ASIN moved from [less recent edition](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42278685.lessrecentedition "less recent edition") A KICKASS FEMALE DETECTIVE CLEANING UP THE BIG EASY Follow smart, savvy, and refreshingly human homicide detective Skip Langdon through the twists and turns of a New Orleans teeming with crooked cops, mob squabbles, and southern kinships gone awry. This quick-witted former debutante-turned-rookie cop investigates the Mardi Gras shooting of a prominent Uptown socialite, tracks a terrifying serial killer who’s snagging victims at AA meetings, and searches for a runaway teen who may have stabbed the well-loved director of the famed New Orleans Jazzfest. That’s just for starters—in the last two books she discovers juicy secrets in the tangled web of a pre-Facebook virtual community, and caps it all off by sifting through the mystery of a toppled restaurant dynasty whose patriarch has been murdered. NEW ORLEANS MOURNING It's Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and civic leader and socialite Chauncy St. Amant has been crowned Rex, King of Carnival. But his day of glory comes to an abrupt and bloody end when a parade-goer dressed as Dolly Parton guns him down. Is the killer his aimless, promiscuous daughter Marcelle? Homosexual, mistreated son Henry? Helpless, alcoholic wife Bitty? Or some unknown player? Turns out the king had enemies... AXEMAN'S JAZZ What's the perfect killing field for a murderer? A place where he (or maybe she) can learn your secrets from your own mouth and then make friends over coffee. A supposedly "safe" place where anonymity is the norm. The horror who calls himself The Axeman has figured it out and claimed his territory—he's cherry-picking his victims in the 12-Step programs of New Orleans. JAZZ FUNERAL Skip Langdon just happens to be on hand when Ham Brocato, director of New Orleans Jazzfest, is discovered dead on the kitchen floor in the middle of his own party the evening before the Fest. To complicate the already murky case, the victim's sixteen-year-old blues musician sister has disappeared, and Skip suspects that if the young woman isn't the murderer, she's in mortal danger from the person who is. Melody's dangerous yet exhilarating journey tugs at the heart and raises the pulse rate. DEATH BEFORE FACEBOOK It’s a chilly November in 1994, and thirty-one-year-old Geoff Kavanagh surreptitiously splits his time between science fiction novels and cyberspace in his parents’ dilapidated, overgrown, uptown New Orleans mansion. Until his mother finds him dead from a suspicious fall off a ladder. Maybe he should never have posted about seeing his father murdered … HOUSE OF BLUES Sugar Hebert arrives home from a ten-minute errand to find her husband shot to death and the rest of her family missing—including her daughter Reed, heir apparent to the Hebert restaurant dynasty, and Reed's eleven-month-old daughter.

A cop at the top of her game VScrimes, murders, misdemeanors, and justice gone awry.Seasoned New Orleans detective Skip Langdon is at the top of her game as she tracks down a serial killer, navigates deadly family secrets, and delves deep into the mastermind of a psychopath unlike any you've ever encountered. The goddess-sized cop is up to her shoulder-holster in gritty, action-packed subplots and story twists, as the psychopath threatens those Skip loves. Fans of Ace Atkins, Tana French, Sue Grafton, and Marcia Muller will love Skip Langdon’s pluck and charm! CRESCENT CITY CONNECTIONSure, New Orleans is known for corruption, but suddenly the good guys get a break—an honest police chief. And then someone guns him down. When a terrifying organization called The Jury takes out the cop-killer, Detective Skip Langdon’s on the case. But no one cares! After all, the guy was a cop-killer. Skip cares really a lot—because she suspects The Jury’s the brainchild of her old nemesis, self-described preacher Errol Jacomine.82 DESIREIt seems Councilwoman Bebe Fortier has misplaced her equally prominent husband, United Oil VP Russell Fortier. Across town, part-time detective/poet Talba Wallis has a simple wish—to find out what Russell Fortier's disappearance has to do with her. New Orleans Police Detective Skip Langdon senses something big starting to unfold, something a lot bigger than a missing husband. Something rooted in corruption, resulting in violence—and motivated by that old demon . . . desire.MEAN WOMAN BLUESThe Rev. Errol Jacomine is crazy as a fox and more dangerous than a cell full of serial killers. He's trying to off Detective Skip Langdon, the New Orleans cop who’s twice smashed his criminal endeavors, yet each time he’s managed to slip away. Now he’s mad. In both senses of the word. And he has the connections to have her killed—or worse, those she loves.“Gritty, witty, & mesmerizing! Langdon is a splendid female heroine.” –People Magazine“As usual, Smith serves up a gritty, gripping story along with a big helping of action and a pinch of humor, all appropriately seasoned by the wonderfully steamy steaminess of New Orleans.” –Booklist“A superbly written piece of drama even by Smith’s high standards. There are plenty of subplots to keep things moving…\[and\] a wonderful description of the city’s bizarre Easter parades.”-The State (Columbia, SC)“Langdon is as captivating a character as the city in which she lives and works. This is a series that gets stronger with each book.”\—The Denver Post