Law & Desire

Description

Michael Allen Zell

ISBN: 978-1-935084-84-6
170 pages: $14.95
October, 2016

In Law & Desire, the second book in the acclaimed Bobby Delery crime fiction series, Michael Allen Zell continues to peel back the mean streets of New Orleans. The parallel stories of recently-returned Bobby Delery’s quest to find out what happened to his family and a city councilman’s unorthodox way of fundraising end up meeting sharply in a climax that touches on race, history, and corruption. A rapidly changing yet tradition-bound New Orleans is the fertile setting for vibrant characters including a shady used car dealer, suburban activist, hit men, neighborhood “mayor,” and bike gang. Not all will get out alive.

Like its predecessor (Run Baby Run), Michael Allen Zell’s Law & Desire is a fast moving, gut-punching celebration of life in New Orleans that shimmies way down low along the outer fringe of the almighty tourism grid. The usual neo-noir themes drive the action–private dicks, degenerate losers, imperfect love and plain old bad luck–but are cast through the funky filter of New Orleans’ underground culture and sharpened to a fine point by the author’s keen ear for street poetry. Law & Desire is the latest home-run from an exhilarating new voice of the genre. 
–Louis Maistros, author of The Sound of Building Coffins and Anti-Requiem: New Orleans Stories.

Praise for Run Baby Run

Though New Orleans has always been a remarkable setting, few authors can mine its rich veins and still tell a fine tale. Michael Allen Zell does both.
— David Fulmer, author of the Storyville mysteries

Run Baby Run shows the excellent writing and story-telling ability of Michael Allen Zell. In this intriguing New Orleans-based crime drama, the city is a free-standing character that is central to the plot. I particularly liked Zell’s use of metaphor, deftly mixed with the realism of contemporary political ideology and pop culture. A most enjoyable read. 
—Roland S. Jefferson, author of The School on 103rd Street, Damaged Goods, and One Night Stand

Praise for Errata

“I swear, the text, the actual typed text of Errata itself seems swollen with meaning not simply the humid atmospherics of New Orleans. Swelled up, bled and run together into this concoction of pulpy fictive essaying. Michael Allen Zell’s text is evocative, efficacious, effortlessly magical. These are words making love to words, wrapped up in sheets of steamy grammar all transitive, diagramed to hell and back. Come for New Orleans, stay for new oracles.”
Michael Martone, Author of Michael Martone and Four for a Quarter