In a town jammed with voodoo and gangsters, a sense of intoxicating mystery often beckons from the back alleys. But when a real serial killer roams the sultry nights, even the corrupt cops can't see the clues. That is, until a letter from the Axeman himself is published in the newspaper, proclaiming that any home playing jazz music will be spared in his next attack.

This lush and haunting novel tells 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'Orléans when the evening's festivities are interrupted-by murder. The ravishing Angelique Crozat, a notorious octoroon who travels in the city's finest company, has been strangled...

Nineteenth-century New Orleans is a blazing hotbed of scorching politics and personal vendettas. And it's into this fire that Benjamin January falls when he is hired to follow Oliver Weems, a bank official who has absconded with $100,000 in gold and securities. But it's more than just a job for January. The missing money is vital to the survival of the school for freed slaves that he and his wife Rose have founded. Following the suspected embezzler...

When Benjamin's sister Olympe is arrested for murder, Benjamin feels someone is trying to frame her, but as he begins to investigate the crime, he discovers someone is willing to go to any length to prevent him from learning the truth.

"1863: In a small Creole cottage in New Orleans, an ingenious young Black woman named Stella embroiders intricate maps on repurposed cloth to help enslaved men flee and join the Union Army. Bound to a man who would kill her if he knew of her clandestine activities, Stella has to hide not only her efforts but her love for William, a Black soldier and a brilliant musician. Meanwhile, in New York City, a Jewish woman stitches a quilt for her husband,...

1827. Duncan Lammons, a disgraced young man from Kentucky, sets out to join the American army in the province of Texas, hoping that here he may live and love as he pleases. That same year, Cecelia, a young slave in Virginia, runs away for the first time. Soon infamous for her escape attempts, Cecelia drifts through the reality of slavery until she encounters frontiersman Sam Fisk, who rescues her from a slave auction in New Orleans. She travels with...

"For fans of sweeping historical literature in the vein of Philipp Meyer's The Son or Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, an extraordinary US literary debut set in Paris and colonial New Orleans and based on a true story, about three of the 88 young women-among them an orphan, a madwoman, and an abortionist-who were deported to the Louisiana Territory as brides"--

"In 1872, New Orleans is a city ruled by the dead. But to seventeen-year-old Celine Rousseau, New Orleans is a safe haven after she's forced to flee her life as a dressmaker in Paris. Taken in by the sisters of the Ursuline convent in the middle of the carnival season, Celine is quickly enraptured by the vibrant city, from its music to its fancy soirées and even its danger. She becomes embroiled in the city's glitzy underworld, known as La Cour des...

When Joletta Caresse inherits her family's perfume shop in New Orleans, she also becomes heir to the mystery that surrounds the firm's most important fragrance, Le Jardin de Courstet . The formula for the perfume, discovered during the 19th century by an ancestress named Violet, is lost when the only person who knows the secret dies suddenly without divulging it. Armed with Violet's diary, Joletta sets off for Europe to retrace the trip during which...