The Best of New Orleans-fact and fiction
Explore the best books about New Orleans, blending fact and fiction. Discover captivating novels and insightful reads that bring the vibrant culture and history of NOLA to life.
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New Orleans
by Carol Flake
Describes the preparations for Carnival and portrays the city's different ethnic groups, social hierarchies, and political divisions
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This Dark Paradise
by Wendy Haley
The Danilovs of Savannah, Georgia, have few rivals when it comes to wealth, power, and prestige. But many secrets dwell in their secluded family estate--where ghosts of the past walk hand in hand with shadows of things to come. For the Danilovs are a family haunted by timeless passion--and immortal desires.
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Madeleine's Ghost
by Robert Girardi
Brooklyn needs a saint. Ned Conti needs a stipend. So the struggling young historian agrees to trace the mysterious past of a Brooklyn nun for evidence of miracles. Trapped in a neighborhood of cheap rents and failed promise, in a rent-controlled apartment suddenly, inexplicably seized by a beautiful and angry ghost, Ned's only refuge is the F train to Manhattan's East Village bars, where he and his friends drown their sorrows in drink.... But Ned is about to heed another call, the siren song of New Orleans, where the history of countless lost souls seems to rise from the steaming streets—and where, ten years before, he ended a brief, passionate affair with a woman whose memory has haunted him ever since. Here, in a city of spirits, Ned will embrace a dead saint and a living sinner...as a beautiful ghost offers him her desire. And his destiny.... Set amid the sleepless energy and seething passion of New York and New Orleans, Madeleine's Ghost is a spellbinding novel of lost love, history, and desire—a work of startling originality that is at once exquisitely written and compulsively readable.
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A Free Man of Color
by Barbara Hambly
A lush and haunting novel of a city steeped in decadent pleasures . . . and of a man, proud and defiant, caught in a web of murder and betrayal. It is 1833. In the midst of Mardi Gras, Benjamin January, a Creole physician and music teacher, is playing piano at the Salle d'Orleans when the evenings festivities are interrupted—by murder. Ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled to death. With the authorities reluctant to become involved, Ben begins his own inquiry, which will take him through the seamy haunts of riverboatmen and into the huts of voodoo-worshipping slaves. But soon the eyes of suspicion turn toward Ben—for, black as the slave who fathered him, this free man of color is still the perfect scapegoat. . . . Praise for A Free Man of Color “A smashing debut. Rich and exciting with both substance and spice.”—Star Tribune, Minneapolis “A sparkling gem.”—King Features Syndicate “An astonishing tour de force.”—Margaret Maron “Superb.”—Drood Review of Mystery “A darned good murder mystery.”—USA Today
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Fever Season
by Barbara Hambly
Benjamin January made his debut in bestselling author Barbara Hambly's A Free Man of Color, a haunting mélange of history and mystery. Now he returns in another novel of greed, madness, and murder amid the dark shadows and dazzling society of old New Orleans, named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. The summer of 1833 has been one of brazen heat and brutal pestilence, as the city is stalked by Bronze John—the popular name for the deadly yellow fever epidemic that tests the healing skills of doctor and voodoo alike. Even as Benjamin January tends the dying at Charity Hospital during the steaming nights, he continues his work as a music teacher during the day. When he is asked to pass a message from a runaway slave to the servant of one of his students, January finds himself swept into a tempest of lies, greed, and murder that rivals the storms battering New Orleans. And to find the truth he must risk his freedom...and his very life.
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Voodoo Dreams
by Jewell P. Rhodes
The story of Marie Laveau, a legendary nineteenth-century New Orleans voodoo queen.
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The Feast of All Saints
by Anne Rice
In the days before the Civil War, there lived a Louisiana people unique in Southern histroy. Though descended from African slaves, they were also descended from the French and Spanish who enslaved them. Called the Free People of Color, this dazzling historical novel chronicles the lives of four of them--men and women caught perilously between the worlds of master and slave, privilege and oppression, passion and pain.
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The Crow: The Lazarus Heart
by Poppy Z. Brite
As S&M photographer Jared Poe waits on Louisiana's Death Row to be executed for the murder of his lover, he can not imagine that his search for the true killer will continue after his death in the shadowy realm of The Crow
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Lost Souls
by Poppy Brite
Vampires . . . they ache, they love, they thirst for the forbidden. They are your friends and lovers, and your worst fears. “A major new voice in horror fiction . . . an electric style and no shortage of nerve.”—Booklist At a club in Missing Mile, N.C., the children of the night gather, dressed in black, look for acceptance. Among them are Ghost, who sees what others do not; Ann, longing for love; and Jason, whose real name is Nothing, newly awakened to an ancient, deathless truth about his father, and himself. Others are coming to Missing Mile tonight. Three beautiful, hip vagabonds—Molochai, Twig, and the seductive Zillah, whose eyes are as green as limes—are on their own lost journey, slaking their ancient thirst for blood, looking for supple young flesh. They find it in Nothing and Ann, leading them on a mad, illicit road trip south to New Orleans. Over miles of dark highway, Ghost pursues, his powers guiding him on a journey to reach his destiny, to save Ann from her new companions, to save Nothing from himself. . . . “An important and original work . . . a gritty, highly literate blend of brutality and sentiment, hope and despair.”—Science Fiction Chronicle
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Lafitte the Pirate
by Lyle Saxon
Jean Lafitte, the famous buccaneer, terrorized the Gulf of Mexico during the early 1800s from his hidden base in Louisiana's swamps at Barataria Bay. His battles with the law were legendary: when Governor William Claiborne of Louisiana offered a reward for Lafitte's capture, the pirate offered an even larger reward for the governor! But when the British approached Lafitte during the War of 1812, asking for his help in their invasion of Louisiana, the pirate instead joined forces with Andrew Jackson and helped rout the enemy at the Battle of New Orleans. Lyle Saxon chronicles Lafitte's colorful life and examines some puzzling questions about the famous rogue. Where was Jean Lafitte born? Did he really participate in the French Revolution? What was his part in the plot to rescue Napoleon? And where is his treasure hidden? Separating fact from legend, Saxon paints an entertaining and realistic portrait of a truly remarkable figure in American history. Book jacket.
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Drawing Blood
by Poppy Brite
Escaping from his North Carolina home after his father murders their family and commits suicide, Trevor McGee returns to confront the past, and finds himself haunted by the same demons that drove his father to insanity.
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Shadows on the Bayou
by Patricia Vaughn
Beautiful Sylvia Dupont had one destiny--to become the mistress of a rich Creole gentleman. She was willing to accept her fate until the irresistible Justin Reynaud crossed her path. But the past, not so easily escaped, reached out to repossess Sylvia, sweeping her into a desperate struggle between the chains of tradition and one glorious chance to love.
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Papa La-Bas
by John Dickson Carr
The scene in Papa La-Bas is New Orleans in 1858. There, strong men, lovely women, dark magic and violence swirl around Senator Judah P. Benjamin, who can solve any problem by logical analysis, and Richard Macrae, Her Majesty's Consul, when they witness a devilish murder.
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Fabulous New Orleans
by Lyle Saxon
Reprint. Originally published: New Orleans: R.L. Crager, 1950.
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Exquisite Corpse
by Poppy Z. Brite
From the acclaimed author of Lost Souls, Drawing Blood, and Wormwood comes the provocative and thrilling serial killer novel that #1 New York Times bestselling author Peter Straub calls “a guidebook to hell.” To serial slayer Andrew Compton, murder is an art, the most intimate art. After feigning his own death to escape from prison, Compton makes his way to the United States with the ambition of bringing his art to new heights. Tortured by his own perverse desires and drawn to possess and destroy young boys, Compton inadvertently joins forces with Jay Byrne, a dissolute playboy who has pushed his own art to limits even Compton hadn’t previously imagined. Together, Compton and Byrne set their sights on an exquisite young Vietnamese American runaway, Tran, whom they deem to be the perfect victim. Swiftly moving from the grimy streets of London’s Piccadilly Circus to the decadence of New Orleans’s French Quarter, Poppy Z. Brite dissects the landscape of torture and invites us into the mind of a killer. With “intelligence, sweep, nerve, knowledge, and deeply unsettling erotic power” (Dennis Cooper, author of Frisk), Exquisite Corpse is a novel for those who dare trespass where the sacred and profane become one.