Nearer Home

May 27, 2013
Near the start of Castro’s solid second crime novel set in post-Katrina New Orleans (after 2012’s Hell or High Water), Nola Céspedes, a staff writer for the Times-Picayune, stumbles across the ritually posed corpse of a woman while jogging in Audubon Park. Céspedes recognizes the victim as Judith Taffner, her former—and despised—Tulane journalism professor, and while clues at the scene suggest the killing was the work of an obsessed psychopath, the reporter can’t help wondering if they were designed to conceal the murderer’s true motives. Compulsively curious, Céspedes begins to unravel Taffner’s secret lives, revealing her as a person by turns bright and self-deluding, a determined professor fatally entangled in the Big Easy culture of political and police corruption. Castro’s prose is clean and to the point, and she shows considerable affection for New Orleans. Agent: Mitchell Waters, Curtis Brown.

July 1, 2013
The murder of a New Orleans journalist sets off a battle between a reporter determined to tell her story and a shadowy opponent equally determined to keep the truth under wraps. When Times-Picayune writer Nola Cespedes (Hell or High Water, 2012) goes on her morning run, the last thing she expects to find is the body of her former journalism teacher, professor Judith Taffner. Though Nola was no fan of Judith back at Tulane, she's soon chasing the story of Judith's life, not only because it's her job, but also due to her intense personal desire to help solve the crime. When Nola meets Judith's husband, Luke Jourdan, and young daughter, Chloe, she starts to wonder if Judith had changed from the hardened woman Nola knew. But she questions her reassessment when she reads the files Judith saved on her work computer. It seems that Judith had a few stories in the works guaranteed to make her a target of people in high places. Soon, Nola has more leads than she has time for. Her overwhelming list of to-do's is extended even further when Marisol, Nola's designated "little sister" from the national program, decides to skip out on her parents and bunk with Nola. But all this activity has a silver lining: It keeps Nola from having to respond to her pseudo-boyfriend Bento's repeated requests for greater intimacy. The highlight here is in Nola's personal relationships, which show her to be funny, flawed and formidable.

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