Customer Reviews

Crescent City Kill

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is a national movement called The Jury that has arrived out of nowhere, hides behind a veil of secrecy, and is attracting the attention of many good people who are covertly cheering them on. Who is this group? Ostensibly, they are a group of citizens concerned that the justice system in America is letting too many guilty people go free. Rather than sit idly by, they intend to do something about it. Their first act of vigilante justice is to kill an OJ like sports figure who was found not guilty of murdering his wife. The public felt that the man bought his innocent verdict and that justice was finally served.

In New Orleans, a corrupt white police superintendent resigns and is replaced by an honest black man. The people have hope that the wide spread corruption will be swept away by the new top cop. Instead, the man is gunned down by a supremacist, who loathes the idea of a black running the police department. When the police, including Detective Skip Langdon, arrest the perp, The Jury assassinates him. Skip smells the evil odor of her old enemy, the psychopathic Errol Jacomine, as the mastermind behind The Jury. In a cat and mouse game where the stakes are Skip's life, the officer and the criminal must enter the other's head if they expect to win the fight.

CRESCENT CITY KILL is a classic good Vs evil battle with the villain being so alluring he obtains the support of good people. The intrepid heroine is forced to risk her soul in an epic war against the evil genius. This is an excellent novel in a superb series that fans will not want to miss.

Harriet Klausner

While maybe not one of the greatest of the Skip Langdon novels, Crescent City Kill delivered all the excitement I've come to expect from Smith. However, I'm getting a bit tired of the Jacomine business, and I'd like to move on. It may be an easy way to come up with new novels, but I think some different plot lines might be good every other book or so. Still, while it isn't the earlier Skip Langdon novels, it's worth reading.

Julie Smith was recommended to me some time ago by an online friend when I was discussing how I like mystery novels best when they explore a location/time as their main reason for being. I have never been to New Orleans, so I cannot evaluate how accurate her exploration of it really is, but this certainly does seem to fit into the category of exploration of space.

I picked this particular book in the Skip Langdon series up at random in a second-hand store. It probably is not the best place to have begun with the series. There's no real mystery, since it is reasonably clear from the beginning who the bad guy is-- more a question of proving it than figuring it out. Moreover, the baddie is clearly a recurring character so I suspect that I missed a lot of subtext relating to the earlier books. So although I enjoyed the writing and the context, the plot was a little bit weak.

If someone can recommend another book by Smith that would be a better place to begin, I might be willing to give it a go.

This book was especially wonderful for me because I am originally from New Orleans.