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Cordelia Spencer Sheehan, the matriarch of a rich and powerful New Orleans family, offers private investigator Chanse MacLeod a generous fee "to find reasonable doubt for the jury" that her daughter-in-law killed her son, Wendell, even though she has admitted just minutes before, "His wife shot him, of course." There is also the fact, which does not seem to trouble her, that she admits to having picked up the pistol herself and accidentally firing it into the floor, leaving powder burns on her hand – not to mention that she knows (as comes out later) that hers are the only prints on the weapon. Janna, the wife, has told the police that Cordelia killed her husband. Against his better judgment, Chanse accepts the case, but only when he becomes aware that Cordelia possesses some kind of a hold over his main employer, Barbara Castlemaine, for whom he does security work. Thus begins the fifth novel in a New Orleans series whose titles all start MURDER IN THE . . . . Though there are natural references to earlier cases, this one stands completely on its own. And though its hero-narrator is gay, the waywardness of heterosexuals is what drives the present case. Wendell Sheehan was defeated in his post-Katrina run for mayor, but he had held a number of city and state offices and was rumored to be eying a bid for the U.S. Senate. Once Chanse and his gifted assistant, Abby Grosjean, begin digging (with the help of Abby’s computer genius boyfriend), they discover that no one seems to have liked Wendell personally. The consensus is that he was an abusive, self-centered philander. But there are some conflicting stories about his character. For instance, was he a habitual drunk or a recovering alcoholic and AA member? As Chanse begins stripping away layer after layer of lies that protect the Sheehans, other questionable deaths start coming to light, including one in which Barbara was involved. Abby wryly remarks, "It’s interesting how people who get close to the Sheehan family keep dying." This is a family tragedy – one of almost Faulknerian proportions, uncoiling with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy – as witnessed by an escapee of an East Texas trailer camp who has made it to his present position only because his athletic prowess got him out of his own family and onto the Louisiana State University football team. Being an outsider to Garden District aristocracy, Chanse almost misses some crucial elements of the family dynamics that are driving the case. But at the end, he realizes, "The whole Sheehan case, really, had been about mothers and their children." Chanse himself, just before the case begins, has returned from Houston, where he was summoned by his sister to see his mother for the first time since he left that trailer. As soon as Barbara asks about her condition in the first pages of the novel, the reader senses that she is dying. Not until near the end of the book, however, does the full story come out about what all happened with his mother that eventful day when he left for LSU. The subplot, minor as it is, serves to make the texture of the novel that much richer. With such an engaging and intricately woven story, two melodramatic subplots seem, therefore, unnecessary embellishments. The author brings back a villain from the second novel in the series, MURDER IN THE RUE ST. ANN (2004), to go gunning for Chanse. All the while Category 4 "Hurricane Ginevra" (clearly based on 2008's Hurricane Gustav) is churning across the Gulf directly towards New Orleans, triggering (as Gustav did) a massive evacuation. Neither villain nor storm mar the story (after the literal part of me accepts the fact that Ginevra is fiction). They just seem so inconsequential compared to the harrowing portraits that form the heart of the mystery. I mostly skipped through them to get back to that heart, which continues to haunt me. (A footnote for prospective readers: the Archie Barousse who appears on page 67 will later become Archie Larousse.)
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, October 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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