Julie Smith: The Kindness of Strangers (USA 1997)

From the Publisher:
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 enemies. 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.

Julie Smith: The Kindness of Strangers. A Skip Langdon Novel. Ballantine Books, ISBN: 0804112738 (July, 1997), 358 p., $5.99.

Julie Smith: The Kindness of Strangers (USA 1996)

From the Publisher:
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 enemies. 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.

JULIE SMITH's other Skip Langdon novels, all set in New Orleans, include House of Blues, New Orleans Beat, Jazz Funeral, The Axeman's Jazz, and New Orleans Mourning, for which she was given the Edgar Award for Best Novel. A former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the San Francisco Chronicle, Julie Smith is also the creator of the Rebecca Schwartz series of mysteries set in San Francisco. Ms. Smith lives in New Orleans.

Julie Smith: The Kindness of Strangers. A Skip Langdon Novel. Fawcett Columbine, ISBN: 0449909379 (July, 1996), 338 p., $21.00.