In 1916, at age fifteen, Norma Wallace arrived in New Orleans. Sexy and shrewd, she quickly went from streetwalker to madam and by 1920 had opened what became a legendary house of prostitution. There she entertained a steady stream of governors, gangsters, and movie stars until she was arrested at last in 1962. Shortly before she died in 1974, she tape--recorded her memories-the scandalous stories of a powerful woman who had the city's politicians in her pocket and whose lovers included the twenty-five-year-old boy next door, whom she married when she was sixty-four. Combining those tapes...

"When Thea Tamborella returns to New Orleans after a 10-year absence, she finds a city gripped by fear. The privileged white socialites of her private-school days pack guns to fancy dinner parties and spend their free time in paramilitary patrols. The black gardeners, maids and cooks who work days in the mansions of the elite Garden District return each evening to housing projects wracked by poverty, drugs and gang violence. The city's haves and have-nots glare at each other across a yawning racial divide as fear turns to hate and an us-against-them mentality. Wiltz probes to the roots of...

Before The Lost Get-Back Boogie appeared to wide acclaim in 1986, James Lee Burke had been out of print in cloth for thirteen years and his fifth novel had received a record 111 rejection letters. LSU Press put me back in the game and turned my career around, Burke says. The novels and stories Burke had written during those years of rejection eventually became the stuff of the Dave Robicheaux series, which has earned him two Edgar Awards. Reviews of The Lost Get-Back Boogie now seem prescient. This is the book that Burke was born to write - and you're grateful he did, wrote syndicated...