When Maureen Coughlin first appeared in The Devil She Knows, the New Orleans Times-Picayune called her "unforgettable" and "the character of the year." Booklist named The Devil She Knows one of 2011's ten best thrillers and declared Maureen "as compelling a character as this reviewer expects to see this year."
Now she's back in Bill Loehfelm's new thriller, The Devil in Her Way, and her life has changed in more ways than one: she's starting over in New Orleans as a newly minted member of the police force.
Kicking off her final week of field training, Maureen takes a punch from a panicked suspect bursting out of an apartment. Her training officer laughs it off, and the incident even yields a small victory: the cops recover a stash of pot and guns. But out on the street, on the fringes of the action, Maureen sees something sinister transpire between two neighborhood boys that leaves her shaken, and she knows there's more to the story than she's seen. As we follow Maureen's dangerous hunt for answers, Loehfelm leads us around New Orleans' most hidden corners and into its darkest outposts.
Bill Loehfelm is the real deal—a lauded thriller writer in the modern tradition of Dennis Lehane, Richard Price, and Michael Connelly. He knows the voices of his city. Like Lehane's Boston, Price's New York City, or Connelly's Los Angeles, Loehfelm's New Orleans leaps off the page, as vibrant, flawed, and unruly as his reborn, fire-hearted protagonist. In The Devil in Her Way, Loehfelm's talents flourish, and the result is a ruthless and propulsive thriller.
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“Like
his creation, Loehfelm grew up in Staten Island and now lives in New Orleans,
and his beautifully written novels excel at capturing the sounds, smells, and
rhythms of both places to perfection…Post-Katrina New Orleans, with its
thriving French Quarter, its still-ruined neighborhoods, its scandal-riddled
police force, and its often obnoxious tourists, has been the setting for a couple
of outstanding crime novels, including James Lee Burke’s The Tin Roof Blowdown and Sara Gran’s quirky Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. Loehfelm’s The Devil in Her Way measures up to that
standard and then some.”
—
Associated Press