Dassas Cormier returns to Marshall's Bayou in the spring of 1924 to find that his old friend Red Doucet has been murdered. Grace, the only woman Dass has ever loved, is also back in Marshall's Bayou, and she wants him to look for her missing husband. He's surprised when his search leads to another murder. Are the two murders linked? More important, is Grace involved?
In 1925, Dassas Cormier makes good on a promise and escorts his nephew Frank to New Orleans, but their vacation quickly turns into a search for a killer when Dassas learns a friend, an exotic dancer, has been murdered. As he digs deeper into the dark side of the city, Dassas discovers secrets that involve politicians, bootleggers, federal agents, and underworld thugs—and confronts the shadows that haunt his own heart.
In the fall of 1926, a crime wave in Marshall's Bayou sparks talk of pirate ghosts. Police Chief Dassas Cormier knows the thieves are flesh and blood, but he isn't too worried until one of Marshall's Bayou's residents is found dead in his own home. Surprisingly, the thieves are indeed pirates—more or less—and they manage to capture Dassas. The leader of the band, Sid, carries a knife she doesn't hesitate use. Can Dassas survive captivity while piecing together the murder? And can he manage not to fall for the pack of vagabonds with hard-luck stories?
A New York Times Bestseller & the Basis for the Hit Showtime Docuseries Murder in the Bayou is a New York Times bestselling chronicle of a high-stakes investigation into the murders of eight women in a troubled Southern parish that is “part murder case, part corruption exposé, and part Louisiana noir” (New York magazine). Between 2005 and 2009, the bodies of eight women were discovered in Jennings, Louisiana, a bayou town of 10,000 in the Jefferson Davis parish. The women came to be known as the Jeff Davis 8, and local law enforcement officials were quick to pursue a serial killer theory, stirring a wave of panic across Jennings’ class-divided neighborhoods. The Jeff Davis 8 had been among society’s most vulnerable—impoverished, abused, and mired with mental illness. They engaged in sex work as a means of survival. And their underworld activity frequently occurred at a decrepit motel called the Boudreaux Inn. As the cases went unsolved, the community began to look inward. Rumors of police corruption and evidence tampering, of collusion between street and shield, cast the serial killer theory into doubt. But what was really going on in the humid rooms of the Boudreaux Inn? Why were crimes going unsolved and police officers being indicted? What had the eight women known? And could anything be done do stop the bloodshed? Mixing muckraking research and immersive journalism over the course of a five-year investigation, Ethan Brown reviewed thousands of pages of previously unseen homicide files to posit what happened during each woman’s final hours delivering a true crime tale that is “mesmerizing” (Rolling Stone) and “explosive” (Huffington Post). “Brown is a man on a mission...he gives the victims more respectful attention than they probably got in real life” (The New York Times). “A must-read for true-crime fans” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), with a new afterword, Murder in the Bayou is the story of an American town buckling under the dark forces of poverty, race, and class division—and a lightning rod for justice for the daughters it lost.
Sam Calvert is the only veterinarian within a hundred miles of Rocky Butte, Colorado. He doesn't have time to get involved with anyone, but when a stranger appears at the local restaurant, he can't let her walk out into the night alone. She isn't dressed for the cold, and the look of desperation in her eyes has him worried. Allie Tate has hit rock bottom. The only thing she really wants is a home, but life won't cooperate. When she discovered her husband cheating, she ran. Her car, however, died in the mountains, so she's on foot without money or a friend. Sam and Allie initially butt heads over her ability to take care of herself and earn her keep. To avoid detection by her possessive, dishonest husband, Allie hides her past. Sam, meanwhile, is wrestling with the fact that his fifteen-year-old daughter, Tracy, is on the threshold of adulthood. When Tracy arrives for the summer, their emotional struggles kick off a series of disasters. Allie tries to help Sam and Tracy work out their relationship and falls for Sam in the process. But when Sam finds out Allie's still married, his world crumbles. Can this couple find a way to work out their differences, or will the differences between them be too much for their fragile relationship to bear? Sarah Storme resides in Santa Fe, NM.
African Americans' long campaign for "the right to fight" forced Harry Truman to issue his 1948 executive order calling for equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces. In War! What Is It Good For?, Kimberley Phillips examines how blacks' participation in the nation's wars after Truman's order and their protracted struggles for equal citizenship galvanized a vibrant antiwar activism that reshaped their struggles for freedom. Using an array of sources--from newspapers and government documents to literature, music, and film--and tracing the period from World War II to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Phillips considers how federal policies that desegregated the military also maintained racial, gender, and economic inequalities. Since 1945, the nation's need for military labor, blacks' unequal access to employment, and discriminatory draft policies have forced black men into the military at disproportionate rates. While mainstream civil rights leaders considered the integration of the military to be a civil rights success, many black soldiers, veterans, and antiwar activists perceived war as inimical to their struggles for economic and racial justice and sought to reshape the civil rights movement into an antiwar black freedom movement. Since the Vietnam War, Phillips argues, many African Americans have questioned linking militarism and war to their concepts of citizenship, equality, and freedom.
