From Amazon.com
Talba Wallis, hip and happening PI, a.k.a. the Baroness Pontalba, star of the New Orleans avant garde, was first introduced in
Louisiana Hotshot and returns in this deft, well-written mystery about Babalu Maya, a "healer" who wants to know if her boyfriend is cheating on her. Shortly after Talba confirms her client's suspicions, Babalu dies of a heroin overdose the police are certain is a suicide. But both Talba and Jason, Babalu's contrite and confused boyfriend, find it such an improbable scenario that he hires Talba to find out what really happened. Unraveling the mystery takes the sassy sleuth with the attitude that's bigger than she is to the small Louisiana town where Babalu was born and to the prominent, influential family that turned its back on her a long time ago. While the plot isn't much more than a routine Southern gothic, the heroine is: Talba Wallis is a lively, engaging protagonist with family secrets of her own that are revealed in a secondary plot that's much more interesting than the primary one. Smith, the author of three other series, has a real winner in this one.
--Jane Adams
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
From Publishers Weekly
In her second outing (after 2001's well-received Louisiana Hotshot) from Edgar-winner Smith, Talba Wallis, whose day job as a newly licensed PI never interferes with her nighttime gig as the performance poet called the Baroness de Pontalba, finds herself entangled in the dirty laundry of white folks' family secrets when she sets out to prove that her friend Babalu's death was murder, not suicide and not a drug overdose. In the end, the snarl of old family skeletons, corrupt politicians and racial ugliness becomes too serpentine for its own good, and the solution to the murder is vaguely unsatisfying. Far more appealing are the strongly drawn characters. The interplay between the young black woman and her much older white boss, a man who admires her brain and her fearlessness but would never let on, is warm and respectful; Smith nicely plays it against the very real and very dangerous racial divide that Talba encounters when she investigates her friend's smalltown past. The fiercely independent Talba still lives with her no-nonsense mama, Miz Clara, who makes the best fried chicken known to man and thinks Talba's way of dressing for poetry readings makes her look like "some fool who's been to one too many rummage sales." But Talba, as her sweet schoolteacher boyfriend never fails to remind her, is every inch a baroness. She's also a fine poet, and one of the delights of the book is that Smith lets us peek inside the mind and heart of a poet at work, revealing the process as well as the result.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.
