A Talba Wallis Novel By night the glamorous Baroness de Pontalba, by day New Orleans’ hippest P.I., Talba Wallis is dumbfounded when she can’t do a simple background check on an old friend—Babalu Maya just doesn’t seem to exist on paper. Four days later, she doesn’t exist at all. As Talba threads her way backward through Babalu’s short, difficult life, she finds an intricate pattern of violence and fear, and a shadowy Mr. Big with homicidal intent. Talba butts right into everybody’s business in Clayton, Louisiana, a small town with a big, ugly secret, where being black, mouthy, and smart are the three qualities most likely to get her killed. As she uncovers dark truths, events and people spiral into nasty motion in a story that has more twists and turns than the Mississippi River.

Increasingly disturbed by her inability to uncover the true identity of an old friend, New Orleans private investigator and poet Talba Wallis takes on a suspicious new client and encounters an ugly secret in the small town of Clayton, Louisiana.

Allyson Brown---the Girl Gatsby, they called her. A woman of wealth, hostess of fabled parties, patron of the arts, especially of poets. Found floating in her own swimming pool, shot to death. Poet and fledgling detective Talba Wallis gets an urgent call from the sister she barely knows, Janessa. The Girl Gatsby was Janessa's close friend. But this call isn't an invitation to an elegant literary salon. Janessa wants off the hook as the principal murder suspect. Investigating, Talba and her perpetually irascible boss, Eddie, find the reality behind the Gatsby glamour. Allyson Brown was widely hated, a con artist who neglected her children, failed to pay her bills, and lied to everyone. The one person she loved may have ushered her to her death. The case takes Talba and Eddie from literary parties to Gulf Coast bait shops, from biker bars to abandoned wharves, and finally to the story of another Gatsby, which may yield answers, or greater mysteries. Louisiana Lament is Talba's journey through the not-so-genteel Southern literary scene, where backbiting and petty jealousies abound and mint juleps are served with canapés of carnage. At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

Talba Wallis--African American poet, leader of New Orleans' café society, and fledgling private detective--is hired by veteran sleuth Eddie Valentino to find a dangerous lothario who seduces teenage black girls who then mysteriously vanish.

A searing anatomy of a New Orleans murder trial and a system of justice gone wrong. In a New Orleans supermarket parking lot in the fall of 1984 ,two disparate lives become inextricably bound for the next fourteen years. The first, the life of Delores Dye, a white housewife and grandmother. The second, a young black man with a gun in hand. Moments following their maybe not so chance encounter, Mrs. Dye lay dead on the sunbaked macadam, and the killer had made off with her purse, her groceries, and her car. Four days later, following a tip, authorities arrested a known drug dealer and father of five named Curtis Kyles. Kyles would then be tried for Mrs. Dye's murder an unprecedented five times, though he maintained his innocence throughout each trial. Convicted and sentenced to death in his second trial, he would spend fourteen years on death row. After a fifth jury was unable to reach a verdict, New Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr., finally conceded defeat and dropped the murder charge. But the case slowly yielded a deeper drama: The crime turned out to have been the side effect of an intricately plotted act of revenge. That police and prosecutors may have been complicit in the vengeance that framed Kyles cuts to the heart of a system of justice for Southern blacks in the era since lynch mobs were shamed into obsolescence. A compellingly written legal drama that has at its heart passionate intrigue and justice gone awry. Desire Street is a 2006 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Fact Crime.

When the smiling King of Carnival is killed at Mardi Gras, policewoman Skip Langdon is on the case. She knows the upper-crust family of the victim and that it hides more than its share of glittering skeletons. But nothing could prepare her for the tangled web of clues and ancient secrets that would mean danger for her--and doom for the St. Amants.... "Smith is a gifted writer." THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

This compelling work tells the story of Anne Skorecki Levy, a Holocaust survivor who transformed the horrors of her childhood into a passionate mission to defeat the political menace of reputed neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Through Levy's t