Big Show [Mass Market Paperback]

Veteran Homicide Detective Dino LaStanza turns the wrong way down a one-way street and almost runs over a burning man stumbling across a quite uptown street. LaStanza burns his hands putting the fire out. The man dies and for the next 320 pages, LaStanza works elentlessly to solve this heinous crime. Meanwhile, LaStanza and his partner Jodie Kintyre must catch a serial rapist who murdered his last victim.

This is life in the big pressure cooker, in the overworked New Orleans Police Homicide Division, the big show of police work.

! ! The streets of New Orleans are never better described than in De Noux's work, a former homicide detective. These books are not for everyone. They are uncompromising in their portrayal of cops who would never win a popularity contest. Years of witnessing violence has effected them. They see life differently than we do. De Noux shows this from the inside.

What De Noux doesn't do is glorify the killers. In THE BIG SHOW, we don't get into the killer's heads, we see them only as the police see them. We walk the streets, talk to real New Orleanians, see how cops use gallows humor (which De Noux does better than anyone) to release the tremendous tension that comes with the job of hunting killers.

LaStanza is unique. He's Sicilian-American, born of immigrants into a city whose culture is still dominated by ancient families. Unlike clichéd cops who drink too much or who are down-and-out bachelors roaming the streets like alley cats, LaStanza is not an alcoholic and is ma! ! rried (luckily to a rich woman). He gets to drive a Masera! ti (which was stolen in the previous book on this series, pretty damn funny because LaStanza was cocky enough to drive it around the seedier parts of town). His wife, Lizette, is far smarter than LaStanza (she's a graduate student) and an extremely sexy woman. This may frighten some readers, because Lizette knows the power of her sex. Sometimes, she's too much like a Playboy bunny, but this IS fiction. Few writers can write a sex scene as steamy as De Noux.

What De Noux does here is put a working class cop in a mansion with a beatutiful wife and servants, providing LaStanza with an automatic inner conflict. It bothers him to be rich. He leaves this comfortable life every morning for the bloody streets. It's typical New Orleans, rich vs. poor, uptown vs. inner city, Sicilian-American vs. everyone else.

The other suppporting characters are very nteresting. Jodie Kintyre, LaStanza's deadly serious partner, is a methodical, committed detectives with great inner streng! ! th. Paul Snowood, the cowboy wannabe, constantly provides humorous relief (sometimes annoyingly). Stan-The-Man Smith is even more annoying, a scene-stealer who sometimes lives up to his nickname of Psycho. The killers are chilling because, as in real police work, we only see them briefly, in violent snapshots. We don't get much about the victim's lives either, again because cops don't have time for a biography of their victim. Cops are too busy trying to catch the killer.

This book isn't perfect. The publishing house did a poor job of proof reading and spell checking this book. Then again, it's a new publishing house, so they should learn from this.

De Noux doesn't pull punches with language. Laced with the profane language of the street, THE BIG SHOW is not for children nor for anyone interested in profound literature. It's a too real for that.

I highly recommend this book. If you like reading Joseph Wambaugh, Elmore Leonard or James Lee Burke, then you'll li! ! ke reading this book.

I'm a woman, so don't think this bo! ok is only for men. JUST READ THIS BOOK.

As a long time New Orleans resident, I am tired of travelogue novels that only describe the sections of the Crescent City and Louisiana that you see in movies, TV shows, guided tours and Julie Smith novels. De Noux takes the reader into the mean streets of the city and introduces to the real characters that inhabit the city, not white-suited stereotypes speaking with implausible accents and dialect. De Noux maintains the same level of realism in his portrayal of police work. Homicide cases are not always clear-cut, interconnected and quickly solved. Police work is tedious and grueling work that exposes officers to the worst that mankind has to offer. This explains the twisted characters that inhabit De Noux's novels. ! ! To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, they may not be good men, but they're the best in their world.