Down in the Flood

Starred review from June 8, 2009
Set in New Orleans shortly before and during the Katrina catastrophe, Abel's outstanding third Danny Chaisson crime novel (after 2002's The Burying Field
) strikes with hurricane force, leaving plenty of shattered truisms in its wake. When sadistic hoodlums kidnap Louis Sams, who's been pressured by the Feds to turn in his crooked concrete manufacturer boss, Danny, a former assistant DA now making a slim living with insurance claims and deposition summaries, desperately tries to save Sams. As Danny slogs through a city violent at best and now caught up in a killing rage, drowning because of engineering failures, construction shortcuts and venal politicians, he discovers that all he and some of the poorest of the storm's victims have is each other. Brilliantly executed, Abel's exploration of decency and grace in the face of human brutality and natural disaster testifies to mutual respect, the only thing, Danny knows, that keeps the knife from your throat.

May 15, 2009
As Katrina rages, Danny Chaisson (The Burying Field, 2002, etc.) chases two ex-cops who may kill his client. The real question, however, is much bigger and darker: Who killed New Orleans?

With the levees breaking and the water rising relentlessly, the truth is both unbearable and unavoidable:"New Orleans was dying, and there were men in the darkness who were ready to finish it off." Among these are a pair of murderous ex-cops, remorseless as the storm itself. Danny, a lawyer with a thorny conscience, pursues the lowlifes who are holding his client Louis Sams prisoner thorough the"toxic gumbo" that was once his beloved city. Decent, courageous Louis is preparing to testify before a grand jury about fraud and corruption in unassailable places. The bent cops, now hired guns, have been sent to stop him any way they can. Danny, who holds himself responsible for counsel carelessly offered, knows he must stop them if he's ever to sleep easily again. While he'll do everything he can to keep one man alive, he knows in his heart that soon his"city will be full of dead" and that killers in the corridors of power will probably go unpunished.

Bleak through and through, of course, but it's one of those stories begging to be told, and Abel puts you there.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from July 15, 2009
An engineer tells New Orleans lawyer Danny Chaisson that he knows the concrete used in the city's levees is substandard but disappears while trying to get hard evidence that his company has cut corners, leaving the city unsafe. As Hurricane Katrina bears down on Louisiana, Chaisson faces two choices: getting his family out of New Orleans or finding the engineer. VERDICT Abel's latest is both a gripping crime thriller about human greed and a tribute to the people of New Orleans. Readers who enjoyed James Lee Burke's own take on Katrina, "The Tin Roof Blowdown", may want to try this one. [See also Mary Anna Evans's "Floodgates", below.Ed.]

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2009
Danny Chaisson is a New Orleans lawyer specializing in collections, wills, and real estate, but in the past, hes worked undercover to bring down a cabal of crooked New Orleans influence peddlers and politicians. He knows how the system works when an individual gets caught in its crosshairs, which leads him to help his receptionists relative, Louis Sams, whose sons legal troubles have given the Feds the leverage to squeeze him. Theyre afterinsider documentation on Sams employer, whom they suspect of Mob ties. Danny agrees to help Sams negotiate a deal for his son, butJimmy Mancuso, the mobster, kidnaps young Sams before his grand-jury testimony. Then Katrina hits. Danny ignores evacuation directives and stays in town to save Sams from Mancuso, paddling around in commandeered boats to a final, jarring confrontation with mobsters and crooked ex-cops. The latest Chaisson novel is routinely plotted but is rescued by carefully defined characters and a wonderful rendering of the panic on the streets in a New Orleans battered by Katrina.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)