The Neon Smile

New Orleans private eye Terry Manion reluctantly takes on an assignment from a tabloid TV show to re-examine the jail suicide of a black radical, Tyrone Pano, accused of murdering a woman 30 years earlier.The novel then jumps back 30 years. Manion's mentor, J.J. Legendre, an honest man shunned by the corrupt New Orleans police department, gets the Pano case while being locked out of the big news - a serial killer patterning his murders of women on a 19th-century killer called the "Meddler."But the new Meddler witnessed the killing of the woman in the Pano case and takes a personal interest. Without seeing his face, the reader learns the killer is a man of position in the city and regards his killings as a means to an end.When J.J. finally gets assigned to the Meddler case, he notices an anomaly that turns the investigation around. But as J.J. gets closer to the killer, the killer homes in on the cop's new girlfriend. After a riveting climax, Lochte jumps his novel back to the present.J.J. is dead and Manion is discovering a few connections his old friend missed. The Meddler is still out there and he hasn't mended his ways.Lochte takes a risk nestling a story within a story but makes it work. New Orleans is steamy, J.J. and Manion are both quirky individual presences and the action reaches climactic heights twice.

Lochte writes about New Orleans like Chandler wrote about Los Angeles. He knows the city and the people and the talk. And he gives us two different mysteries rolled into one. Check it out.