New Orleans Requiem — D.J. Donaldson

In the tradition of Patricia Cornwell's Body of Evidence and Postmortem, D. J. Donaldson is back again with a new mystery featuring New Orleans Chief Medical Examiner Andy Broussard and criminal psychologist Kit Franklyn, the detective team whom the critics have hailed as "a winning combination." In New Orleans Requiem, the Big Easy is playing host to an annual convention of forensic pathologists when suddenly the city is horrified by a series of bizarre murders and Broussard suspects the killer may be a fellow coroner. It is just one week before Mardi Gras in New Orleans when a pretty young artist, about to begin work on a sketch of picturesque Jackson Square, makes a grim discovery: lying on the floor of the locker in which she stores her brushes and oils is the body of a gruesomely murdered man. One of his eyelids has been removed, and on his chest are placed four tiles from the word game Scrabble, forming the letters KOJE. When two more bodies are discovered with strikingly similar clues, Chief Medical Examiner and gourmet extraordinaire Andy Broussard and his savvy associate, Kit Franklyn, suspect they are on the trail of a serial killer. And it couldn't be a worse time for a sensational case to break because, as host to the annual convention of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Broussard is expected to make sure everything runs smoothly. The knife wounds and the arrangement of the Scrabble letters point to someone with an uncanny knowledge of forensic medicine and a deeply violent grudge against Broussard. But who would want to kill the ebullient coroner, and what connection to his past does an old newspaper photo deliberately left at the crime scene hold? Once again, D. J. Donaldson combines taut suspense with fascinating forensic detail and the exotically sensual atmosphere of New Orleans to create a mystery that is impossible to put down.