Desire Street: A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans

I had read this book one week prior to Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the canals. Desire Street, covers the New Orleans judicial and police systems in regard to a murder of a white woman in a supermarket parking lot by a black who framed an innocent black for the murder. The journalist put forth a fairly objective story line which took the reader deep into the 9th ward and the lives of the people we saw portrayed on our TV screens this week. Though I read it because we have Sister Prejean coming to town next week and I wanted to expand my opinions. Having read it prior to Hurricane Katrina made what was portrayed by the newscasts even more poignant and heart wrenching. If you want to better understand the pulse of what once was, New Orleans you'd be wise to put this book in your cart.

The book's about Curtis Kyles, who was freed from Death Row in Angola after the Supreme Court reviewed his trial and decided that if all the evidence had been presented he wouldn't have been convicted. The police and the DA's office are supposed to give the defense lawyers all the evidence they uncover, but in this case they kept silent any info that didn't help prove the railroaded defendent was guilty. He was set up by a rival criminal in the neighborhood who was a police informant. The police actually gave him a regular paycheck in exchange for info on crimes. The book is interesting because it doesn't paint the exonerated man, Curtis Kyles, as an innocent man. It goes into all his criminal activity, selling drugs, selling stolen goods, and robbing people on the street. I think that he had planned to sell the gun and other items from the crime, the shooting death of an older lady out shopping at a discount grocery store in broad daylight. The police informant was found driving around in the dead lady's car, and soon pinned the killing on Curtis. After 4 trials with hung juries, the DA in New Orleans, Henry Connick, Jr's dad, conceded defeat and Curtis was allowed to go free. The book is written by a local newspaper reporter and does a good job describing the racism in the city. The book describes in detail life inside the Orleans Parish Prison, the local New Orleans jail full of violence and rapes, and on death row in Angola.

Jed Horne's DESIRE STREET is that book: the one we want to curl up with, the one that can take us away, the one that remains in our minds for a very long time. In rich nuanced prose, Horne tells the mind-boggling story of Curtis Kyles, a black man accused of murdering a white woman in racially charged New Orleans. Incredibly, Kyles goes to trial five times for this one murder because juries just can't seem to agree whether or not he is guilty. Horne puts us right into Kyles's New Orleans, mean streets filled with love and family as much as with crime and poverty. And by brilliantly weaving together details about the police investigations and trials of Curtis Kyles, Horne reveals that in the New Orleans criminal justice system that old saying is truer than ever: "In the halls of justice, the justice is in the halls." DESIRE STREET is true crime, real life, and a book that once read will not be forgotten.

Dolores Dye, a feisty, attractive, white, middle class grandmother, 60 years old and an ex-rodeo rider, lies dying in a supermarket parking lot, blood and brain fluid pooling beneath her, while her assailant, a young, dark-black man from one of the darkest city underbellies in America, a professional criminal by birth, brazenly maneuvers her red Ford into the line of cars exiting the lot before casually pulling out and vanishing into the thickening traffic: a murder in broad daylight, with eye-witnesses; a purse-snatching gone bad; a brutal, stupid, cowardly crime about to fan the racist flames in cops and prosecutors alike in a city already ablaze with white-flight and its attendant fear and loathing. So begins Jed Horne's "Desire Street," subtitled "A True Story of Death and Deliverance in New Orleans," a 14-year saga of a dark crime brought slowly and painfully into light and focus. Not really a whodunit, but with the rolling thunder feel of one, its plot unfolding ever more surprisingly, and not a "private-eye" subterranean journey, but with more windows into worlds forbidden or otherwise inaccessible than that genre ever afforded, "Desire Street" draws us into the ghostly half-life of slum-warren junkies' somnolent predation, perverse symbiotic relationships of detectives and snitches, Death house despair, the layered world all the way up, finally, to the pristine and delicate machinations of Federal Supreme Court maneuverings. We generally read non-fiction to learn stuff: how the world connects and works. But we tend to turn to fiction, with its comforting circles of clarity and closure, to story us through lives too often apparently just one damned thing after another. And if we're told non-fiction is the art of the age, we may darkly suspect that this may be related to the death of the American imagination, our curious confusion of fact with truth. How startling then to discover such a pure work of non-fiction, the reportage so thorough and seamless as to be nearly invisible, that also has the reverb and mythical splendor of a Faulkner tale. I am tempted to call "Desire Street" hardboiled non-fiction, but it is too scrupulously written for that, too elegant, with almost a poet's sense of efficiency, rhythm and the mot juste: not a syllable sensationalized or self-indulgent; no conjecture or surmise; just facts and deeply understood characters marshaled with the almost invisible touch of a masterful storyteller possessed of a great journalist's eye and penchant for legwork. In this last regard, this is also clearly a work of great courage, at many levels. And it begets characters that get up and walk around in your head on your way to the drugstore or supermarket, haunting characters that "cast long shadows" as Faulkner liked to say. It is a story that has found its perfect teller in a veteran journalist, long-time resident of the French Quarter, and City Editor of New Orleans' great old newspaper, The Times-Picayune, for whom truth

This book is simply fabulous and anyone who has ever been to New Orleans, wanted to, or plans to has got to read it. I finished it in about 16 hours, and the last time I did that was for Da Vinci code (I know, I know, I'm not proud about it). The characters are rich and detailed, the story is riveting, and the writing is unique and refreshing. Warning: If you are looking for pulp fiction, this book isn't for you (I think the local grocery store check-out counter still maintains that monopoly). If books with too many words turn you off, turn on the tube. But if you are looking for a vibrant tale of New Orlean's secret codes of conduct, and one of the most interesting crime stories in New Orleans history, buy this book!