It’s Mardi Gras in 1958 New Orleans, and Alex Moreau wants revenge. He doesn’t want it. He needs it. He needs it for the death of his mother at his gangster father’s hands. He needs it for the half-imprisoned life to which his father’s condemned him. He needs it… because that’s who he is.So Alex invites Texas gambler Deke Watley to a high stakes Mardi Gras poker game. Deke thinks he’s hit the jackpot when his chance to win big collides with a woman he once knew-a woman he wronged-a wrong he’s regretted ever since.But it’s Alex’s game, and he weaves the worst of his troubled past to create an orgy of vengeance, only to find that the other players have scores to settle, too. Amid the noise and the frenzy of the drunken crowds, streamers flying like electric currents, bejeweled costumes glittering, Deke stumbles through this foreign, lurid town, seeking a return to the innocence he turned his back on long ago. However, the time is running out and old debts must be paid before Alex lets Deke-or any other hustler-leave Bourbon Street alive.
From Bourbon Street: Sometimes the world whispers to you, like too-young flesh too willing. You can almost feel the heat and wet of its tongue on your ear. Some believe it’s God himself singling them out. But no god would so debase himself. No god would swivel his hips and moan and gyrate just for you. It’s the world. It’s the night. The unconscious yowl of a billion souls tramping toward their shocked, pain-wracked ends. Every now and then they swarm. The atmospheric conditions being just right, they join and momentarily rejoice in numbers. Like a demon’s hallelujah chorus, imps on an adrenaline rush; like a dust devil dancing on a dry Texas plain. Sometimes it comes your way.
It’s called bad luck. Dick Adler of Chicago Tribune says: …New Orleans has long been a streetcar straight to a mystery lover’s heart. Now comes a debut book by Leonce Gaiter that deserves a place on that map.
John Broussard of I Love a Mystery says: Gaiter manages to keep the reader guessing up to the last… a riveting tale of inter-racial hatred and its effects on both blacks and whites.
Kirkus Reviews says: The ensuing cycle of Mardi Gras violence is set forth in prose by turns as grandiloquent as Faulkner and clipped and stylized to a fare-thee-well.
