Skip Langdon Books

In New Orleans, police detective Skip Langdon searches for the killer of Rex, King of Carnival for this year's Mardi Gras, a member of the powerful but tragic St. Amant family

New Orleans detective Skip Langdon must track down the brutal Axeman--a serial killer who preys on the city's hundreds of twelve-step recovery groups and who will spare anyone in whose home a jazz band is playing on the night of his rampage

The THIRD book in the Edgar Award-winning Skip Langdon mystery series “ A genuinely moving mystery ... a no-nonsense, level-headed heroine." – The Baltimore Sun " A super protagonist , well-defined characters, and musical highlights make this essential." - Library Journal NEW ORLEANS JAZZFEST PRODUCER STABBED! TEENAGE SISTER MISSING! Everybody loved easygoing Ham Brocato, producer of the famed New Orleans JazzFest. So how did he end up stabbed to death on his kitchen floor? New Orleans Homicide Detective Skip Langdon just happens to be on hand when Ham’s body is discovered in the middle of his own party the evening before the Fest. To complicate the already murky case, the victim's sixteen-year-old blues musician sister has disappeared, and Skip suspects that if the young woman isn't the murderer, she's in mortal danger from the person who is. So Task One is finding Melody, ambitious, unhappy at home, and determined to break from her family. As she probes the victim's tangled relationships, Skip finds a Southern family to rival any in Tennessee Williams, including Ham's live-in lover, feisty and swiftly rising star Ti-Belle Thiebaud; his father George, enmeshed with family members in a bitter disagreement over the family's lucrative Po' Boy chain; and Patty, his distraught stepmother. In this tale of southern kinships gone awry, she's assisted by her long-distance love, Steve Steinman, and her gay landlord, Jimmy Dee. Meanwhile, Melody's dangerous yet exhilarating journey tugs at the heart and raises the pulse rate. “Smith’s Big Easy setting is a lively blend of big city and gossipy small town.” – Publishers Weekly Fans of Laura Lippman, Ace Atkins, James Lee Burke, and the HBO series TREME will adore this satisfying and complex cop whodunit. And fans of YA fiction will fall in love with Melody! Excerpt: “At $250 a pop,” fumed a red-faced man, “you’d think we’d at least get a drink.” The shrill, uncertain buzz they’d noticed was developing a hysterical note. This was a party that wasn’t fun. Bemused, Skip and Steve worked their way back around to the front. “Ham I could see,” said Skip. “He could have had to work late—it’s his busiest time. But where’s Ti-Belle?” “Oh, ‘bout two houses away, I’d say. Approaching at a dead run, having just parked a Thunderbird with a squeal of wheels.” Skip had heard the squeal, but had paid it no mind. Now she saw a very thin woman coming towards them, hair flying, long legs shining brown, sticking out from a white silk shorts suit. Over one shoulder she carried a lightweight flight bag. Golden-throated Ti-Belle Thiebaud, the fastest-rising star on the New Orleans music scene. Steve said, “I’d know those legs anywhere.” She never performed in any garment that wasn’t short, split, slit, or halfway missing. Some said the whole country would know those legs soon. They said she was going to be bigger than large, larger than huge. Thiebaud was approaching at a dead trot, fast giving way to a gallop. She was wearing huge hoop earrings. She had giant black eyes and shining olive skin, flyaway blond hair that looked utterly smashing with her dark complexion. Her skin clung to her bones, hanging gently, as naturally as hide on a horse. “How’d Ham get her?” she blurted. A black man waved at the singer, tried to slow her progress, pretend it was a party: “Hey, Ti-Belle.” Thiebaud paid him no mind but cast a look at the crowd in general. Skip saw twin wrinkles at the sides of her nose—one day they’d be there permanently if she worried a lot in the meantime. “Hi, y’all.” She was trying to smile, but it wasn’t working. “Excuse me a minute.” She let herself in and closed the door behind her. Almost immediately, a scream that could have come from anyone—the hottest Cajun R&B singer in America or any terrified woman—ripped through the nervous buzz.

"ABSORBING...ENTERTAINING...Smith not only gives us the lowdown on the Big Easy but also take us into the often weird world of computer bulletin boards....NEW ORLEANS BEAT is reader-friendly from log-on to log-off." --The Orlando Sentinel An unclassified death on the coroner's daily record is nothing special: a healthy young man found dead after an apparent fall from a ladder. Yet in a neglected old house set inside a jungle of greenery, Detective Skip Langdon listens to an unusually listless mother talk about her son's death and his empty life...and wonders. It seems the shy thirty-one-year-old victim, Geoff Kavanagh, was a computer genius who often frequented the TOWN, a computer network of some 10,000 faceless voices. Within this extraordinary community, strangers achieve an odd type of intimacy, sharing the darkest of secrets. Skip learns that Geoff confessed his own deep secret: he saw his father murdered. Now the TOWN believes Geoff, too, was murdered--and Skip must follow the electronic trail of a killer.... "[A] SUSPENSEFUL MYSTERY...Smith is a skilled writer who can evoke the steamy, mysterious ambiance of New Orleans." --Booklist

Julie Smith's claim to the New Orleans crime scene is indisputable. In House of Blues, she stretches her net of suspense and danger over the whole bewitching city, and her New Orleans beat goes on, ever stronger. Crime is Topic A across America. Even New Orleans, the most gracious American city, has hundreds of homicides each year, and sufficient random violence to keep the city's police force working overtime. So what's one more fatal shooting? When the victim is prominent restaurateur Arthur Hebert, whose distinguished restaurant of the same name attracts both knowledgeable visitors and natives, it's what the cops call a heater case, and the heat is on Homicide Detective Skip Langdon. During the family's Monday night supper, Hebert is murdered in his beautiful Garden District home. At the same time, several other family members vanish: Hebert's daughter, who was soon to have taken over the management of the restaurant, his ex-addict son-in-law, and his small granddaughter--all missing without a trace. A kidnapping gone wrong? Skip thinks it's possible, but why should the kidnappers have taken three hostages when one would have been enough? Skip's hunt for a murderer and the missing Hebert heirs embraces worlds within worlds--the elegant, dangerous Garden District, the French Quarter, the seedy Treme, broken-down projects, exclusive mansions, and lowdown bars. It takes her into places where the city's dirty business is transacted, and those where life is mostly madness, sadness, and badness. It may even take her to her death. (

Julie Smith's New Orleans is not a city, it's a world--exotic, sweetly perverse, dangerously seductive. Nowhere else does politics make stranger bedfellows; and the approaching mayoral election is stranger than most, pitting the usual thugs and vipers against a seeming breath of fresh air--Errol Jacomine, a liberal-minded, civic-spirited preacher. The only problem is, in the opinion of Police Detective Skip Langdon, Jacomine is a psychopath and dangerous as hell. On leave of absence from the police force, Skip becomes obsessed with exposing the frightening figure beneath Jacomine's good-guy image. Immediately, an anonymous army of spies and hatchet men go to work on her, and Skip begins to understand that in opposing Jacomine, she is risking not only her livelihood but her sanity and possibly the lives of people she loves. Skip's instincts seem confirmed when the only witness to Jacomine's crimes turns up dead. Skip thinks there are more bodies buried in Jacomine's past, but it's the present she's worried about. And protecting one of her own against the preacher's evil sends Skip to the dark center of bayou country, where even the elements are her enemy. A deadly chase through the swamp during a fierce hurricane forces Skip to rely not on the kindness of strangers but on her own inner strength to survive. No other novelist so brilliantly sustains the mood of ominous tension or raises the heat index as Julie Smith does in her Skip Langdon novels. Of them all, The Kindness of Strangers tears most fiercely at the heart.

" Sizzles with action ... the most memorable of the series." The Monterey Herald "... characteristically Smith, full of surprises ." The Santa Barbara News-Press A POWERFUL TALE OF JUSTICE GONE AWRY … SPICY SUSPENSE, DELICIOUS SURPRISES, AND GRITTY REALISM Crescent City Connection (formerly Crescent City Kill ) is the SEVENTH book in the Edgar Award-winning Skip Langdon series by Julie Smith Sure, New Orleans is known for corruption, but suddenly the good guys get a break—an honest police chief. And then someone guns him down. When a terrifying organization called The Jury takes out the cop-killer, Detective Skip Langdon’s on the case. But no one cares! After all, the guy was a cop-killer. Skip cares really a lot—because she suspects The Jury’s the brainchild of her old nemesis, self-described preacher Errol Jacomine. And because other lives are at stake—those of Jacomine's granddaughter Lovelace and his younger son Isaac. Eager to add Lovelace to his maniacal fold, Jacomine has Lovelace kidnapped, but she escapes and flees to the bohemian home of her Uncle Isaac, an artist and true eccentric known as The White Monk. Isaac’s taken a vow of silence, but uncle and niece manage to communicate and form a bond that could save both their lives. And Langdon comes up with a plan so clever even the FBI can’t shout her down. " A superbly written piece of drama , even by Smith's high standards ... plenty of subplots to keep things moving...(and) a wonderful description of the city's bizarre Easter parades" - The State (Columbia, SC) “ Serious suspense … Smith’s colorful characterizations and the showdown with Jacomine make this an excellent addition to the series.” - Publishers Weekly “If it’s gritty realism you’re craving, gently simmered with spicy suspense and marvelously memorable characters , Smith is the perfect New Orleans tour guide.” — The Clarion-Ledger For fans of twisty, psychologically astute, heavily atmospheric stories by authors like Nevada Barr, Laura Lippmann, Ace Atkins, and Randy Wayne White. Excerpt: When she visited the first time, Aunt Alice had talked candidly about a relative she thought was dangerous, though everyone else in the family had decided to find him amusing—Earl Jackson, aka Errol Jacomine. Skip came and sat down. She was presented with a writing pad—Aunt Alice could talk to you, but you had to write to her. “Did you get my letter?” Skip nodded. She wrote, “Thank you. That was sweet of you.” Skip’s encounter with Jacomine was national news. Aunt Alice had written to say she knew Skip was just doing her job even though Earl Jackson was a blood relative, and she, for one, not only applauded, she was real sorry the bastard got away. “It’s good to see you again, honey. What can I do for you this time?” “I know it’s stupid to ask,” Skip wrote, “but has Jacomine been in touch with anyone in the family?” “Now, honey, you know I would have let you know.” “Just thought I’d ask,” she wrote, and pulled out a list of the things she’d already done to trace Jacomine: looked for his wife, looked for his son, badgered the Christian Community. “Can you think of anything else I could do?” Aunt Alice’s index finger, under a layer of ladylike pink nail polish, flicked at the list. “Didn’t even know he’d married again.” Skip’s stomach flipped over. Blood pounded in her ears: this was something. She wrote, “Again? You mean this wasn’t his first marriage?” “Oh, lordy, lordy. How would you know? Yes, ma’am, he was married, and thereby hangs a tale. Now where’d I put that thing?” She got up and left the room. Skip wanted to chase her, grabbing at the flapping folds of her purple windsuit. But there was nothing to do but wait, drumming her fingers.

Councilwoman Bebe Fortier has misplaced her equally prominent husband. Across town, part-time detective-poet Talba Wallis has a simple wish--to find out what Russell Fortier's disappearance has to do with her. But the private investigator who hired Talba to spy on Fortier can't help her out. He's lying in his office with a bullet in his chest. At first, Police Detective Skip Langdon thinks it's just a small case with some big names--until she senses something huge starting to unfold. Something rooted in corruption, resulting in violence--and motivated by that old demon . . . desire.

A Skip Langdon Novel Nemesis: the rival fate never allows you to beat. The nemesis of Skip Langdon, New Orleans police detective, is Errol Jacomine. This evangelical preacher has been leader of his own frenzied army of converts, has run for mayor of New Orleans, and now wants to become president of the United States. His campaign methods are rabble-rousing, theft, kidnapping, and multiple murder. Skip thinks he's as dangerous as Jim Jones. She has chased him for years, no luck. Now Jacomine comes after Skip, her lover, and her friends. She must track him down. But his guise this time is so clever even his own children don't recognize him. In Mean Woman Blues , Edgar Award-winner Julie Smith returns triumphantly to her popular series about hip New Orleans detective Skip Langdon, once again operating in sensual, sexy, exotic New Orleans. This time Skip is able to teach Jacomine that nemesis originally meant the goddess of retributive justice.

SHE NEEDS A KID TO CATCH A KILLER…BUT HOW TO CATCH THE KID? "Julie Smith writes like jazz should sound—cool, complex, and penetrating right to the heart.” -Val McDermid, best-selling author of the Tony Hill series The TENTH installment of the Skip Langdon series is a New Orleans feast for the senses, a canine love story, an action-packed police procedural made-to-order for readers who like their female sleuths bold, smart, and refreshingly human. A serial killer is using Airbnb units to stage his murders, but a teenage runaway has escaped his grasp and now she's in the wind, believing she's killed him. Meanwhile the real killer stalks the city – and her. Cody, the pink-haired sixteen-year-old, should be in school or at the mall texting her friends, not hanging out at the intersection of serial murder and human trafficking. When the options are: (1) Return to a life of slavery (2) Go to jail for murder (3) Be killed by a serial killer, Option 4 makes perfect sense – RUN! As mean as the streets of The City That Care Forgot can be, this child attracts angels (often unlikely ones) – and entire packs of dogs – who come to her aid. She also finds a friend in NOPD’s newest Sergeant – big (six-foot!), beautiful, tough, and tender-hearted Skip Langdon. Skip knows her best hope of finding the killer is to find Cody – plus she feels for the girl, in whom she recognizes a younger version of her plucky, resourceful, whip-smart self. The city’s hard-boiled; the detective has a heart the size of the Superdome. Longtime Skip Langdon fans who’ve thirsted for #10 will be delighted to hear the music of New Orleans in Smith’s prose. Fans of female-sleuth authors like Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and Linda Barnes, will love Skip Langdon’s pluck and charm. And those who particularly favor female cop stories, especially those by Nevada Barr, Lisa Gardner, Tana French, J.D. Robb, Karin Slaughter, Tess Gerritsen, and Anne Hillerman will find a new fave here. “If you haven't discovered Smith yet, now is the time to do so… Move over, Sara Paretsky.” --KPFA-FM (Berkeley, CA) “If it’s gritty realism you’re craving, gently simmered with spicy suspense and marvelously memorable characters, Smith is the perfect New Orleans tour guide… --The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, MS) “BRILLIANT.” --San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

PHONES ARE OUT AND THE CITY’S UNDER WATER—A FIELD DAY FOR CRIMINALS. AND LOTS OF THEM ARE COPS… August 29, 2005 - Doomsday: New Orleans is eighty per cent under water—no electricity, no phones, no 911 service, no rules . Facing the complete breakdown of systems and normality, New Orleans homicide Detective Skip Langdon is on her own to interpret and execute the only direction she’s given: Get out there and keep the peace. With communications down and all emergency services on search and rescue, all Skip can hope to accomplish is helping the person right in front of her . More than once that person turns out to be Billy, a gutsy 15-year-old from Treme who’s in greater danger of being swamped by his chaotic home life than the Cat 5 hurricane Skip shelters him from. When she escorts him home and discovers the scene of a possible homicide, homicide detecting must take a back seat to maintaining order—if not peace. Outrageous rumors are swirling, stirring up unrest, but what really bothers her is the one about a police department order to use the chaos as a cover for “cleaning up” by rounding up criminals and assassinating them . Now that just can’t be true. Can it? But after she hears it for the third time, Skip teams up with the only cop in the city she’s positive she can trust, her former partner , movie-star handsome, kickass, praline-sweet Adam Abasolo. They may not be able to fix everything, but, as the bodies pile up, they are damn sure going to hit back at the guys who’re giving their department a black eye. On any regular weekday, New Orleans lives up to its billing as The Big Crazy. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where the dirty cops and lunatics are running the asylum, author Julie Smith also takes us inside the actual asylum, Charity Hospital emergency psych unit, an unexpected oasis of comfort in stark contrast to endless amounts of ever-present filthy water and hordes of half-drowned people. Smith strikes just the right note, capturing the massive tragedy of the events and the inevitable comedy as the survivors struggle to make sense of the closest thing to hell squared that any of them has ever seen. Mystery fans who love hard-boiled women sleuths, lots of action and adventure, and offbeat police procedurals will love Detective Skip Langdon.