Blind Shuffle

An ex-magician-turned-amateur-detective hunts for a missing pregnant woman in this tale of New Orleans noir . . . Rusty Diamond abandoned the Crescent City years ago to pursue fame in Las Vegas, leaving Marceline Lavalle with a broken heart. Now Rusty has finally come back to New Orleans but no one has seen Marceline for days. Five months pregnant, Marceline's vanished without a trace, and her estranged boyfriend, a casino boss with criminal ties and a hair-trigger temper, claims no knowledge of her whereabouts. With the police not yet ready to declare foul play, Rusty launches his own investigation. The search for Marceline will take Rusty into dark corners far from the neon lights of Bourbon Street, where enormous profit can be made from human misery and desperate people hunt on the fringes. The journey will force him to confront the mistakes of his past, and offer him a shot at redemption if he doesn't wind up at the bottom of a bayou first . . . "e;I wanted to take a bite out of Blind Shuffle before breakfast but ended up reading straight through lunch. I finished it on a plane to Tijuana. This was my first Rusty Diamond novel . . . it won't be my last. Dig in."e; Patrick Hasburgh, creator of 21 Jump Street