Daddy's Gone A-Hunting — Robert Skinner

It's 1938 in New Orleans when Ernie LeDoux is released from Angola after serving a 10-year stretch for knocking over an armored truck. And the first thing on his mind is the $75,000 that he has stashed away with an old friend. It is also on the mind of one of the Crescent City's most hardened criminals: Archie Badeaux, a cocaine-snorting socio­path and hired muscle for wheelchair-ridden underworld leader Jonathan Lincoln. Badeaux hasn't forgotten the decade-old heist and aims to follow the ex-convict to the hidden cache. Unfortunately, LeDoux's friend has recently passed away, taking the money's whereabouts with him to the grave. Nightclub owner Wesley Farrell (first introduced in 1997's Anthony-nominated Skin Deep, Blood Red), is a mixed-blood creole "living as a white man in a Jim Crow environment." When Carol Donovan-a fellow club owner whose looks are "enough to make a Baptist minister drink swamp water, crawl inside a hollow log, and bay at the moon"-appears in his office, Farrell is unknowingly swept into LeDoux's story.