‘Murder In the Rue Ursulines’ by Greg Herren
Author: Drewey Wayne Gunn
June 7, 2009
Hollywood glamour comes to New Orleans in the fourth Chanse MacLeod mystery. Mega-stars Freddy Bliss and Jillian Long have bought a house there and begun a campaign to help rebuild the still devastated city. Freddy’s ex-wife, an Emmy-award-winning actress, arrives in town to begin on a movie project. And Jillian’s mother, a former musical comedy star, has followed her daughter there. Chanse is hired by the couple to find out who is sending Freddy threatening e-mails. Before he can finish his investigation, murder strikes, and he suddenly becomes involved in a high-profile media circus. In order to save his own career, he must find the murderer fast. During the course of the case both he and his good friend, journalist Paige Tourneur, seem to retrogress from the emotional breakthroughs they achieved in the award-winning previous case, Murder in the Rue Chartres. The reader is left with a highly competent, if rather obvious, mystery about obsession with little psychological complexity. Nor does it have the rich historical detail that so enriched the author’s other six novels. As always with a Herren novel, it is skillfully written, but I wish it had done more than just held ground.
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MURDER IN THE RUE URSULINES
by Greg Herren
Alyson Books
ISBN 978-1-59350-095-5
Paperback, $14.95, 228 pp.
