Skip Langdon

About the Skip Langdon series

Skip Langdon is a six-foot-tall, Uptown-born-and-bred New Orleans police detective (later homicide lieutenant) who spends the series solving crimes that keep dragging her back into the city's overlapping worlds -- old-money society she was raised in and rejected, Mardi Gras krewes, jazz clubs, and the Quarter's underside -- across eleven novels by Edgar Award-winning author Julie Smith. New Orleans Mourning (1990) opens the series with a Mardi Gras Day murder during the Rex parade and won Smith the 1991 Edgar Award for Best Novel; the books that follow keep Skip investigating cases tied tightly to specific, well-observed corners of New Orleans life, from the Axeman-murders true-crime echo of The Axeman's Jazz to the funeral-industry setting of Jazz Funeral. Smith, a former New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter, writes the city with a journalist's eye for institutional detail and a comic touch that keeps the violence from turning grim. Skip's supporting cast expands as the series goes -- most notably Talba Wallis, the poet-turned-private-investigator who debuts as a minor character in 82 Desire (1998) before headlining her own four-book spinoff series. After 2003's Mean Woman Blues, the series went quiet for fifteen years before Smith returned to it with two further novels, Murder on Magazine (2018) and The Big Crazy (2019).