Julie Smith: The Axeman's Jazz (USA 1992)

From the Publisher:
"Julie Smith not only firmly establishes her claim to the New Orleans crime scene, but she explores an intriguing new franchise for the serial killer." -- Sue Grafton

In hundreds of anonymous self-help groups, New Orleans's restless young and not so young search for love, self-esteem, freedom from addictions, a quick roll in the hay, the lost inner child, you name it. Enter the Axeman, a 1990s reincarnation of the city's notorious serial killer of seventy years ago. Pretty Linda Lee Strickland, strangled in her own apartment, is the first victim.

For detective Skip Langdon, cheated of a romantic vacation by the killing, the case is a bummer. Yet as she threads her fascinated way from one self-help group to another, she finds she has more in common with the twelve-steppers than just the murder. And she knows what they do not: that among their anonymous numbers is a deadly dangerous, and dangerously attractive, psychopath...

"Smith draws a lively story from the city's peculiar social mix... [Skip] is an endearingly imperfect heroine." -- The New York Times Book Review
"Marvelous... Julie Smith turns in another rock solid performance." -- Chicago Tribune

Julie Smith: The Axeman's Jazz. A Skip Langdon Mystery. Ivy Books, ISBN: 0804109540 (September, 1992), 353 p., $4.99.