Spring has returned to New Orleans, bringing with it the swarming termites! First-time homeowner Scotty Bradley is feeling like he may have made the biggest mistake of his life buying in the French Quarter. Between dealing with the Vieux Carré Commission rules, termite damage, and contractors, it’s a relief when his best friend David brings the accidental sleuth a case: one of his students is being harassed by a much older man who turns out to be a big wheel politician in one of the parishes outside of New Orleans, up to his neck in corruption. When the politician turns up dead and Scotty’s client is the most obvious suspect, Scotty and his friends set out to prove his client’s innocence. Lots of people wanted the man dead, but someone doesn’t want all the corruption in St. Jeanne d’Arc Parish exposed. And if that's not bad enough, someone from Scotty's past returns, making him question what he thinks he knows about himself and his own history...

In his memoir, Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain personified the river as “Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam’d by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing!” Twain’s time as a steamboat pilot showed him the true character of The Great River, with its unpredictable moods and hidden secrets. Still a vital route for U.S. shipping, the Mississippi River has given life to riverside communities, manufacturing industries, fishing, tourism, and other livelihoods. But the Mighty Mississippi has also claimed countless lives as tribute to its muddy waters. Climate and environmental conditions made the Mississippi the perfect incubator for diseases like malaria. Natural disasters, like tornadoes, floods, and even an earthquake, have changed and reshaped the river’s banks over thousands of years. Shipwrecks and steamboat explosions were once common in the difficult-to-navigate waters. But when there was money to be made, there were some willing to risk it all—from the brave steamboat captains who went down with their ships, to the illegal moonshiners and pirates who pillaged the river’s bounty. In this book, author and Mississippi River historian Dean Klinkenberg explores the many disastrous events to have occurred on and along the river in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—from steamboat explosions, to Yellow Fever epidemics, floods, and Prohibition piracy. Enjoy this journey into the darkest deeds of the Mississippi River.

The spring and summer of 1927, the Mississippi River and its tributaries flooded from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Gulf of Mexico, tearing through seven states, sometimes spreading out to nearly one hundred miles across. Pete Daniel's Deep'n as It Come, available again in a new format, chronicles the worst flood in the history of the South and re-creates, with extraordinary immediacy, the Mississippi River's devastating assault on property and lives. Daniel weaves his narrative with newspaper and firsthand accounts, interviews with survivors, official reports, and over 140 contemporary photographs. The story of the common refugee who suffered most from the effects of the flood emerges alongside the details of the massive rescue and relief operation - one of the largest ever mounted in the United States. The title, Deep'n as It Come, is a phrase from Cora Lee Campbell's earthy description of the approaching water, which, Daniel writes, "moved at a pace of some fourteen miles per day," and, in its movement and sound, "had the eeriness of a full eclipse of the sun, unsettling, chilling." "The contradictions of sorrow and humor,... death and salvation, despair and hope, calm and panic - all reveal the human dimension" in this compassionate and unforgettable portrait of common people confronting a great natural disaster.

A tour of the Mississippi River and its surrounding area.