Showing results by author "O'Neil De Noux" in All Categories

It's Police Detective Dino LaStanza's first week in Homicide and he must handle the horrific murder of Marie Sumner, slashed to death on a quiet French Quarter street. LaStanza and his partners work long, frustrating hours with no results. When another woman is slashed to death along Bayou St. John, the detectives bear witness to the carnage again. LaStanza feels even worse this time, almost useless.

In Nazi occupied France during the autumn of 1943, an alluring young woman, two French resistance fighters and an American agent are brought together by the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Their code names are the names of archangels, including Samael, the angel of death. They call themselves Death Angels as they leave a trail of dead German officers and French collaborators from southern France all the way to Paris, as the City of Light prepares for her liberation.

This new collection of mystery stories set in New Orleans features O'Neil De Noux's recurring characters - 1940s Private-eye Lucien Caye, 1890s NOPD Detective Jacques Dugas as well as NOPD Homicide Detectives John Raven Beau, and Dino LaStanza (he's back!). There are also a couple ghost stories, a maniac story, the gold bug of Jean Lafitte, a man with moon hands and a future-cop story with a guy named Max.

In 1900, the crumbling French Quarter is an enclave of immigrants, primarily Sicilian. Early one July evening, four-year-old Luigi Bova is lured from in front of his house by the promise of ice-cream by a man who tosses Luigi into the back of a passing wagon. A frantic search ensues but Sicilians are reluctant to call the New Orleans Police Department populated by mostly Irishmen. Detective Jacques Dugas, taking a short cut through the Quarter, comes upon a street full of people looking for the missing boy and takes command of the situation.

An American with special talents is sent to the Portuguese colony of Macao to discover why Japanese agents are frantically searching for a mysterious gem called the Blaer. Murder quickly follow as the American stumbles on a vivacious brunette who needs rescuing. Or does she? This audacious woman has her own special talents. The chase is on as Japanese spies and German thugs pursue the American secret agents who turn out to be superheroes with superpowers.

Take a walk on the wild side along the beaches of the Mississippi Gulf Coast before Katrina with Lucy Incanto, daughter of a Mafia boss who is about to inherit millions, along with the freedom she's never had. Lucy Incanto is hot. At twenty-three she is about to inherit a fortune – money, property and the family business – the Incanto Family – La Cosa Nostra, Mafia. The lone offspring of Boss 'Big Luke' Incanto, who is dying in a hospital bed, the life of this pampered, porcelain-doll Mafia Princess is about to change.

This is New Orleans - 1950. She crossed Canal Street from the neutral ground, walked right past Private Eye Lucien Caye, and he watched her come and go, both views unforgettable. A woman can do that on occasion, sear an indelible image in a man's mind. She remained a snapshot until a week later when she stepped from the darkness beneath the balcony of Lucien's building shortly after midnight, on a sultry Thursday night.

When 24-year-old twins Laurie and Joseph Ercolani inherit a bundle upon the death of their estranged father, they learn their sailing-enthusiast father also left each an identical sailing yacht. The twins have different ideas about what to do with their inheritance. Laurie sees it as an opportunity to fulfill her dream of making a movie. Joe sees it as seed-money for a get-rich-quick scheme.

This is New Orleans - 1947. It starts as a wandering daughter case when a pretty widow hires New Orleans private eye Lucien Caye to find her 22-year-old daughter. Helen Croix walks into Caye's office with a picture of her missing daughter, Madelyn. She warns Lucien he'll be tempted when he finds the alluring strawberry-blond temptress. Madelyn Croix will most likely seduce him. Helen describes her daughter as rapacious. Lucien has to look up the word to discover it means avaricious, greedy, ravenous - subsisting on live prey.

Before Katrina - New Orleans is the murder capital of America and her troubled streets give rise to a cop who hunts killers with methodical, calculating precision, innate in a man half-Cajun and half-Sioux. While others lose their heads in the maddening hunt for a cop-killer, Homicide Detective John Raven Beau focuses his instincts in the relentless pursuit of a murderer.

Along the backwash of the Milky Way Galaxy lies a sun-kissed planet Earthlings call Octavion, a world of sparkling blue oceans, emerald green forests, bright deserts, and blue-green lakes. The size of Earth, with a similar star for its sun, Octavion is moonless with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, a planet of colors so vivid they amaze humans. During the day, the Octavion sun raises the temperature into the 90s Fahrenheit. With a nearly non-existent polar tilt, the seasons change so little, they are barely recognized.

Come prowl the lonely, sometimes violent streets of American's most exotic city, the city that care forgot, New Orleans, with a lone-wolf private-eye named Lucien Caye. Unlike most 40s PIs, Caye rarely drinks, doesn't smoke or wear a hat (it messes up his hair). He's six feet tall with wavy, dark brown hair and standard-issue Mediterranean-brown eyes, a sly smile and a clever mind that often gets him into trouble. Caye lives and works in the run-down New Orleans French Quarter of the late 1940s.

This is New Orleans - 1982. In Homicide, you're only as good as your last case. Fresh from solving the Slasher Murders, NOPD Homicide Det. LaStanza must investigate a "floater" pulled from the Mississippi River. The bloated body with two holes in the head is the son-in-law of the La Cosa Nostra boss, Alphonso Badalamente. Sicilian-American LaStanza is in the middle of a Mafia slaying.

Did an insulting decree spark the murder of a young US Army lieutenant in Yankee-occupied New Orleans? Or was it something else? Capt. Jason Bartlett, infantryman-turned-provost marshal investigator must wade through waves of Yankee anger and rebel animosity to solve the mystery.

Whispering Gulch isn't much of a town. Didn't even have a boot hill like Tombstone. On a dusty day, near the end of the 19th century, a Pinkerton man arrives in Whispering Gulch on a wandering daughter case. Hired by the wealthy father who'd received letters from his daughter postmarked "Whispering Gulch", the Pinkerton man shows a photo around. Several old timers claim this could be the "nekked lady". Could this be a prank?

Mark Twain called it The Gilded Age, those years after the Civil War to the end of the 19th Century. It was a time of great prosperity and great poverty, a time of great opportunities and social unrest. Not a golden time but an era covered in a golden shell – gilded. On a dark night in Noressex, New York, Police Detective Mike Labruzzo comes to the aid of Matthew Den Helder, the injured son of the wealthy Den Helder family.