Down in the Flood
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
All the top crime writers agree that Kenneth Abel is a spectacular writer: "A gripper all the way," says Elmore Leonard. "A stunning achievement," declares James Lee Burke. "Brilliant," says Robert B. Parker. And now with Down in the Flood, former New Orleans prosecutor Danny Chaisson is back in a third electrifying thriller.
Danny Chaisson's latest case is bid-rigging. But as his investigation proceeds, a gathering storm named Katrina blasts his world apart.
Surrounded by death and the destruction of the city he loves, Danny searches for one man who'd trusted Chaisson to guard his identity when he agreed to testify before a federal grand jury investigating corruption in the city's construction industry. But someone has leaked the identity of this crucial witness, and as the city begins to empty before the approaching storm, Danny learns that a pair of corrupt policemen hired by the wealthy defendants in the case have begun stalking his client.
Cut off from escape, and unsure whom he can trust, Chaisson's client has gone into hiding in the city's Ninth Ward, where he grew up. Now Danny must race against time, a pair of relentless professional killers, and the rising flood waters to save the man who'd counted on him.
But can Danny save one man as a whole city dies?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in New Orleans shortly before and during the Katrina catastrophe, Abel's outstanding third Danny Chaisson crime novel (after 2002's The Burying Field) strikes with hurricane force, leaving plenty of shattered truisms in its wake. When sadistic hoodlums kidnap Louis Sams, who's been pressured by the Feds to turn in his crooked concrete manufacturer boss, Danny, a former assistant DA now making a slim living with insurance claims and deposition summaries, desperately tries to save Sams. As Danny slogs through a city violent at best and now caught up in a killing rage, drowning because of engineering failures, construction shortcuts and venal politicians, he discovers that all he and some of the poorest of the storm's victims have is each other. Brilliantly executed, Abel's exploration of decency and grace in the face of human brutality and natural disaster testifies to mutual respect, the only thing, Danny knows, that keeps the knife from your throat.
