My love for New Orleans began at seventeen, with a cooking job on Bourbon Street. Forty years later I began incorporating stories and characters from the long career in restaurants and bars that followed the summer job into the award-winning Cadillac Holland Mysteries. The books are also my way of bringing discussion to facets of the city's miserably failed recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

I wrote the mysteries on the framework of the BBC series Foyle's War, in which what should be straight-forward investigations become a tangled mess because of outside factors and unexpected limitations.