The Fanlight

NEW ORLEANS' OLDEST, MOST ENDURING MYSTERY SOLVED!

Fans of Michael Llewellyn's time travel trilogy will be pleased that his heroine, Madeleine St. Jacques, is back in The Fanlight. Maddy won't be slipping back in time, but she gets deeply involved when her friend Gemma Clark explores links to the past. Gemma's comfortable French Quarter life is turned inside-out by a phone call from a drunken stranger claiming to be a long-lost cousin. The fateful call leads her to an abandoned antebellum house which the cousin insists belongs to their family. There Gemma finds a long-forgotten trash pit offering up a porcelain doll's head, rouge pots, wine bottles, a perfume stopper, bones and more, each discovery a window to the house's exotic past. The most provocative revelation is a connection to Storyville, the city's notorious red-light district which flourished 1897-1917. As the truth is slowly revealed, the madams and their girls, jazz musicians, political bosses, voodoo queens and other colorful Storyville denizens, many of them real personages, are brought vividly to life. It is the stuff of dreams...and not a few nightmares. The truth about Gemma's family unravels a duplicitous world of lies, obsession and murder, but it's the shattered stained-glass fanlight above the front door which holds the key to the city's oldest, most enduring mystery. Once it's pieced together and the truth revealed, neither Gemma or New Orleans will ever be the same.

Michael Llewellyn is the author of 24 books of historical fiction, contemporary fiction, mystery, true crime, time travel, Southern humor and nonfiction travel. The Fanlight was inspired after eleven years as a resident of the French Quarter and a passion for archaeology. He presently lives in Virginia.