Review: Excellent and exciting story set in New Orleans.  But Kindle edition needs some work.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 08 15, 2010
I purchased this book and am writing this review in response to a posting  by the author on the Amazon Kindle forum lamenting that there were no reviews of any of his books.  Therefore, I humbly weigh in.I thoroughly enjoyed this mystery/action thriller set in New Orleans (always a treat to read a book set in this fascinating city).  Val Bosanquet, the main character, is a former police officer (detective?) from NO, who retired after capturing a young girl, Marie Duval, who killed her own mother while defending herself from her mother's voodoo torture/ceremonies.  She was only 9 at the time.  Although convicted of the crime, the extenuating circumstance allowed her to obtain mental and other rehab.  Now, ten years later, with the help of a Haitian charitable organization, she will enroll as a freshman at New Orleans University- which will be controversial due to her violent past.  The school hires Val to be the new chief of campus police, believing that his past involvement with her will help diffuse the problems.Val, still shadowed emotionally by that old case, agrees.  As he does so, he begins to learn new facts about that old crime, leading to investigate the Haitian charity, a famous athletic goods manufacturer, and old "Baby Doc" Duvalier's (of Haiti) followers and enemies in a series of new corruptions, some related to that old crime.With many twists and turns, a heavy dose of the Haitian community, voodoo, and the bayou areas around the city, the story rapidly moves forward to a series of well built climaxes.  In short, this is a fine mystery, with well defined characters, good action, and a satisfying conclusion.  I will read more of his books, and encourage others to do so.The Kindle edition (I'm not sure if the book is in print) had a significant number of "typos", and a few formatting problems.  The typos were mis-use of words (quite instead of quiet, is one example).  The formatting issues took the form of missing quotation marks, paragraph indentations and the like.  These problems were NOT disruptive in reading the book- but there were too many for my taste.  A careful re-edit of the book should eliminate them, and is always worthwhile.Finally, a few other remarks to the author.  I purchased the book about 3 weeks ago.  At that time the price was $2.99, but it is now up to $4.99.  I think that is too high for an unknown author (with no reviews other than this one).  I would encourage him to lower the prices of his ebooks back to $2.99.  Second, I seem to remember that when I read the summary of the book on the Amazon page a few weeks ago, it had a very minimal summary of the story.  That seems to have been corrected as the summary now is much better at giving a reader an idea as to what the book is about.  This is a change for the good.  (I haven't looked at his other book summaries, but I hope he has improved them as well.)  Last, he is identified as an Irish author, but I didn't find anything in his writing (style, language, etc) that would lead me to think of him as Irish.  Just wanted to point this out.In summary, a very good book, and a hearty recommendation for a good read!