Garden of Forbidden Secrets — Eric Wilder

After being inexplicably traded mid-season to New Orleans, aging basketball star Taj Davis encounters a demon in his hotel room. When he ends up naked and bleeding in the hotel hallway with a bloody voodoo doll in his hand, he decides he needs some questions answered. Taj encounters a young woman named Adela. Adela has long, red hair and a voodoo symbol on her chest exactly like the one Taj has on his chest. A strange man Taj meets at the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 advises him to consult with Mama Mulate, a local voodoo expert.Hired by an NBA superstar, French Quarter private detective Wyatt Thomas and voodoo mambo Mama Mulate are launched into a hard-boiled thriller. Wyatt learns that Adela has magical powers and secrets to hide. When she transports him on a supernatural journey, he is hard-pressed to distinguish the experience between reality, a dream, or dark fantasy. As the bizarre mystery unfolds, Wyatt and Mama learn Taj's demon is linked to an unsolved murder that had occurred one-hundred-eighty-years before on the thirteenth floor of the oldest hotel in the French Quarter. It also leads them to the torture, brutality, and horror that occurred in the noir setting of the infamous Lalaurie Mansion, a place many believe to be the most haunted house in the Big Easy.There's a cemetery in New Orleans where thousands of bodies are buried, beneath a single headstone, in a common grave. Wyatt deals with the ghosts and departed spirits at this haunted cemetery to find a time portal to time travel back to antebellum New Orleans where he must deal with insanity, brutality and an Irish Witch who practices powerful magic.