On This Page
Description
A Talba Wallis Novel By night the glamorous Baroness de Pontalba, by day New Orleans' hippest P.I., Talba Wallis is dumbfounded when she can't do a simple background check on an old friend--Babalu Maya just doesn't seem to exist on paper. Four days later, she doesn't exist at all. As Talba threads her way backward through Babalu's short, difficult life, she finds an intricate pattern of violence and fear, and a shadowy Mr. Big with homicidal intent. Talba butts right into everybody's show more business in Clayton, Louisiana, a small town with a big, ugly secret, where being black, mouthy, and smart are the three qualities most likely to get her killed. As she uncovers dark truths, events and people spiral into nasty motion in a story that has more twists and turns than the Mississippi River. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
Members
- Recently Added By
Author Information
69+ Works 5,995 Members
Mystery author Julie Smith was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1944. She graduated from the University of Mississippi with a degree in journalism. After graduation, she moved to New Orleans and wrote features for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. After a year, she moved to San Francisco and got a job at the San Francisco Chronicle. Fourteen years show more later, she left to form a freelance writing firm called Invisible Ink with two other women. In 1982, her first novel, Death Turns a Trick, was published. Since becoming a full-time author, she has written over twenty novels including the ones in the Rebecca Schwartz Mystery series, the Paul McDonald Mystery series, the Skip Langdon Mystery series, and the Talba Wallis series. Her novel, New Orleans Mourning, won the 1991 Edgar Allen Poe Award for best novel. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Julie Smith is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing.
Series
Work Relationships
Is contained in
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Louisiana Bigshot
- Original publication date
- 2002
- People/Characters
- Talba Wallis; Eddie Valentino; Darryl Boucree; Babalu Maya; Jason Wheelock; King "Trey" Patterson III (show all 7); Hubert "Buddy" Calhoun
- Important places
- New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
- Dedication
- To four good kids: Stella Tripp, Grant Smith, Paloma Tripp, and Will Smith
- First words
- Under normal circumstances, getting a Louisiana PI license is so routine as to be boring--you take a course, you pass a test, and you pay your money.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Just can't help thinkin, as time goes by. thinkin' maybe, time's a wastin' here. How 'bout some, Equal time?
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 224
- Popularity
- 144,975
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.85)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 3
