Frank Carlson Library

Bestselling author Barbara Hambly's A Free Man of Color and Fever Season established Benjamin January as one of mystery's most exciting heroes. Now he returns in a powerful new novel, a sensual mosaic of old New Orleans, where cultures clash and murder can hover around every darkened corner....
It is St. John's Eve in the summer of 1834 when Benjamin January—Creole physician and music teacher—is shattered by the news that...

Psychic Olivia Bechet witnesses a murder in her sleep. When she witnesses the second murder, she reports it to the police, but jaded detective Rick Bentz doesn't believe her. Her next dream shows her the face of the serial killer's next victim, who is closer than she ever imagined.

"Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations to the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of these chilling transactions into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter...

Louisiana, 1843: a German immigrant thinks she recognizes a young slave girl as the long-lost daughter of her German friend, but the girl has no memory of such a past, and her owner refuses to free her. In novelistic detail, historian John Bailey reconstructs the exotic sights, sounds, and smells of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, an "infernal motley crew" of cotton kings, decadent river workers, immigrants, and slaves. The dramatic trial offers...

Against the sultry backdrop of New Orleans, Detectives Rick Bentz and Reuben Montoya take on their first case together in #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jackson's chilling novel of a serial killer's obsessive vengeance...

As host of New Orleans' radio talk show Midnight Confessions, Dr. Samantha Leeds is a trusted confidante to all kinds of troubled souls. But the call that comes to her own home one night is different—menacing,

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In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, longtime New Orleans residents Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun are cast into an unthinkable struggle with forces beyond wind and water. In the days after the storm, Abdulrahman traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared-- arrested and accused of being an agent of al Qaeda.

Spanning six decades of the 1800s, this mesmerizing story is a fictional biography of Marie Laveau--one of the most haunting characters in New Orleans' history. Part of a long line of voodoo priestesses and healers, Marie tells of the mystery, passion, and violence that pattern her life. Like her grandmother, Marie sees visions from an early age. She never knew her mother, who practiced a spiritualism so potent she was murdered by those who feared...

Aidan Flynn, a private investigator and eldest of the Flynn brothers, scoffs at the rumors the New Orleans plantation his family has inherited is haunted. After he finds a human bone on the grounds, Aidan is joined by the tarot card reader Kendall Montgomery to uncover the truth.

"When 6-year-old Ruby Bridges and her mother went to William Frantz Elementary School on November 14, 1960, they arrived to find an angry crowd of white people shouting racist insults. For her safety, Ruby had to be escorted to school every day by U.S. Marshals. But despite the hateful attitudes of others, Ruby didn't miss a single day of school that year. Discover the incredible bravery of one young Black girl who faced terrible persecution to get...