The drunken carnival ride that is Mardi Gras takes center stage in Bill Loehfelm's hard-boiled crime thriller The Devil's Muse.
Loehfelm (The Devil She Knows) focuses this entry in the Maureen Coughlin series on his protagonist's first experience with Mardi Gras. A scrappy female cop who has no problem speaking her mind, Coughlin lands in the middle of the famous bacchanal, cleaning up after a half-naked parade-goer under the influence of a powerful new street drug. A gang-related shooting near the parade route stirs even more chaos. As Coughlin comforts the victims and tracks down the shooter, she becomes entangled in a power struggle between the press and the New Orleans Police Department that strains loyalties of fellow officers and tests her own resolve.
The Devil's Muse takes place over a short period of time, following Coughlin's Mardi Gras shift. Loehfelm fleshes out the setting and sub-characters with enough detail so that the timespan seems longer. This leads to some slower moments--lulls in the narrative characterized by chatty dialogue and a lack of visceral action--but Loehfelm ratchets up the tension nicely toward the end. He presents a savvy, semi-satirical depiction of social media and Internet news outlets desperate for conflict. Most of all, he succeeds at catching the complex character of New Orleans. His descriptions of Mardi Gras are full of vivid similes--"The crowd roared and raised their faces and hands to the tumbling slips of paper like nomads lost in the desert greeting a long-awaited rain"--but he doesn't shy away from the racial tensions and cultural clashes that define much of inner-city life. --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist, poet and fiction author