After several weeks awash in speculative fiction, it was nice to slide back into the grim and grimy terra firma of nasty mob violence. Enjoyed the trip through zombies, demons, mutants and paranormal bureaucracies, but yeah, feel like I’m back where I belong in R. J. Ellory’s latest A Quiet Vendetta . Oh, and I can totally sit at the grown-ups table now, as it weighs in at nearly five hundred pages. Yeah, I know, and it’s not even a James Ellroy book! I am just all kinds of mature suddenly.

But hey, heft and similar names aside the Ellory/Ellroy comparison goes deeper. If you’re a fan of the yank’s scandal-rag historical Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy (American Tabloid, Cold Six Thousand, Blood’s a Rover) which sported starring and supporting turns from the likes of Jimmy Hoffa, the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe, Sonny Liston, J. Edgar Hoover and Richard M. Nixon (to name but a few), then you’ll probably dig the Brit’s tale of fifty years in the life and deaths of a Mafia hit man which shares some of that illustrious cast. Some of that cast, some of the gallow’s humor developed by lives steeped in violence, and a whole lotta the great details in period-slang, cop-talk, killer technique, and behind the headlines history that make those pages fly by in hundreds.

Vendetta is set in New Orleans and was originally published in the UK in 2005, the same year a certain storm came to change the filter that city has been viewed through for the last six years and I have no idea whether timing has played a role in keeping this one from bookshelves in the states, but it’s here now and lemme just nudge you toward it. 

Another fresh New Orleans title is Storm Damage by Ed Kovacs, and like Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, this one is set mere months after Katrina, involves a detective on a missing person search and looks to be the first in a series. Storm Damage gets into the chaos and lawlessness accompanying catastrophic events – a setting I’m partial to – riots, wars, natural disasters, massive power-outages and infrastructure breakdown just provide great opportunity for crime – even if it’s all planned out (check out Fall Line by Joe Samuel Starnes and you’ll see what I mean). 

So, thanks Roger, Ed for throwing out the dirty ol' welcome mat for me and the Big Easy. 2012 feels well underway.

Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.