The Lower Quarter

July 20, 2015
Blackwell’s (The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish) newest novel immerses readers immediately in sticky, noirish post-Katrina New Orleans. Four unlikely people are drawn together by the seemingly unrelated murder of a tourist. Eli, a rehabilitated art thief who now works in art recovery; Marion, a bartender, artist, massage therapist, and professional submissive (in the BDSM sense); Johanna, an art restorer; and Clay, the scion of a wealthy old New Orleans family—are all brought together through Eli’s search for a painting that may have been taken from the hotel room of a murdered European tourist. As Eli investigates, he realizes there are deep connections among all of them, and that the painting has been taken to help avenge an injustice. Eli must try to unravel the connections and keep Johanna, in particular, safe, as the painting is irrevocably tied up with the secrets of her past—secrets that connect her and Clay to theft, murder, and international trafficking. The sense of place is strong here. The authenticity of Blackwell’s New Orleans experience is clear on every page, from the bars the characters frequent to the sense of a city rebuilding itself and gentrifying. Similarly, the sense of the suffocating smallness of the international community of art collectors is tangible. These factors will grip readers and keep them turning pages. Though the conclusion is rushed and a little peculiar, readers will forgive it because of Blackwell’s consistently stellar writing.

Starred review from July 15, 2015
A man arrives in post-Katrina New Orleans, looking to solve the mystery of a missing painting and a related murder. What he finds is nothing less than love, sacrifice, survival, genius, depravity, and hope. The talented Blackwell (An Unfinished Score, 2010, etc.) weaves an elaborate web for her four major characters. Elizam, recently released from prison for theft, is hired to find a stolen Belgian masterpiece after two paintings by the same artist are discovered in a hotel room beside a dead man. His investigation quickly leads him to Johanna, a beautiful art restorer with a painful past and a debt owed to Clay, a New Orleans blue blood with creative sexual tastes. Marion, an artist/bartender, begins a relationship with Clay and hires Johanna to restore some of her art, damaged by the recent hurricane. The novel is smoothly and expertly plotted and the characters layered, but at the core lies the city itself: seething, wounded, garish, and unstoppable. Blackwell includes the reader in New Orleans' sordid, beautiful past and present with sentences such as "This nourished an understanding that a history can be adopted, that the history of the city could be her history and that she could become part of its history, regardless of where she'd been born or how recently she'd arrived. After all, that was what New Orleans had always been: a receiver of outsiders and immigrants, a blender, a granter of new identities, a place where you could disappear and then resurface under new terms." In this novel, Blackwell has created a vibrant amalgamation of mystery, classic noir, erotica, and ekphrasis. The novel's greatest strength is how it imbues both the loftiest and the seediest moments with grandeur and pathos without being overwrought or overwritten. An artful, gritty love story, eulogy, and survivor narrative for the city of New Orleans post-Katrina.

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November 1, 2015

Once a victim of sex trafficking, Johanna found her calling as an art conservator while staring at a dirty painting after being forced to the floor by a client. Now, having been rescued by Clay, scion of an old-money family and self-styled avenger of wrongdoing, she restores art for private clients in New Orleans. Eli, an accomplished artist and Puerto Rican nationalist jailed for "repatriating" works of art, is employed by the Lost Art Register. He ends up in New Orleans on assignment to find a missing painting linked to a murder victim police nearly missed as Katrina swept into town. VERDICT The deft unfolding of the underlying mystery is rich with characterization and atmosphere and can be appreciated by a wide range of readers. From the author of The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2015
Post-Katrina New Orleans provides the stage for this southern noir by the author of The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish (2007). A man is found murdered in his hotel room and with only two of presumably three paintings by the Belgian artist EugeenVan Mieghem found with him. In a search for the murderer and the missing (or is it?) painting, complicated by the strains on a storm-ravaged city, Blackwell introduces a cast of characters, including an art restorer, the former American ambassador to Belgium and his soon-to-be heir, a Puerto Rican nationalist having done prison time for art theft (of a painting he himself had painted), and others. She weaves in a strong erotic element, and the book has a keen sense of the Crescent City and a convincing knowledge of the world of art, art collecting, and restoration. Restoration, urban and personal, indeed constitutes the novel's theme. Though the plot is set up nicely, it lags as the book goes lengthily on, and its suspense lessens commensurately. Still, for atmosphere alone, this makes a nice pairing with James Lee Burke's The Tin Roof Blowdown (2007).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)