Redemption - Hardcover

Turner, Frederick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151014701 ISBN 13: 9780151014705

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006

Synopsis

Francis Muldoon is a special policeman in the notorious Storyville District of New Orleans in 1913. His job is to see that the District’s volatile mixture of sex, alcohol, and gambling doesn’t boil over but instead rolls along at a continuous simmer. Once a member of the city’s regular police force, he now works for the District’s vice lord, Tom Anderson, patrolling his patron’s honky-tonks and saloons and whorehouses—both the high-priced bordellos and the coffinlike cribs where the girls work with only a cot and a washbasin.  When Adele, a beautiful singer at the Tuxedo dance hall, draws Francis into a contentious rivalry for her affection, a fatal shootout is the inevitable conclusion, sending the District into a scalding eruption and revealing the central characters for what they are.

Filled with the rich atmosphere of America’s most colorful city, Redemption is the powerfully told tale of a man’s efforts to restore the integrity of his soul.

About this title

About the Author

FREDERICK TURNER is the author of many works of nonfiction and two novels, and is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

Reviews

In this second fictional outing (after eight nonfiction titles and 1929: A Novel of the Jazz Age), Turner evokes the debauchery of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century with intoxicating period detail. The grip of longtime vice lord Tom Anderson on the Storyville District's diversions of booze, half-hour whores and high-class brothels is challenged by the arrival of the Parker brothers, whose gangster money and thug muscle have Anderson's crew looking over their shoulders. Francis "Fast-Mail" Muldoon, the lost-soul protagonist, was a champion runner as a boy (hence the nickname) and then a city cop, before he was crippled in a shooting and falsely accused of cowardice; now he's Anderson's "man about town." But he's reluctant to be drawn into the escalating turf war, and his loyalty to the man who gave him a job after he hit bottom shatters when he uncovers his boss's ongoing romance with a young saloon singer (the object of Muldoon's own stunted affections) whom Anderson had first taken as a lover when she was his teenaged stepdaughter. Fast-Mail's redemption in the bloody finale is the soul-warming center of this emotionally complex page-turner. Turner's sense of time and place—including a cameo by real-life prostitute photographer Bellocq—imbue the novel with atmosphere as steamy as a New Orleans summer day. (Nov.)
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*Starred Review* Following his smashing success in visiting the historical past in his lovely first novel, 1929 (2003), a riveting reconstruction of the life of jazz coronet player Bix Beiderbecke, Turner now embraces another historical figure with the same exuberance, knowledge of history, narrative talent, and stylistic verve. As the sun rises over the Storyville red-light neighborhood of New Orleans in the year 1913, Tom Anderson is the caudillo of the district. At his right hand sits Francis Muldoon, an ex-cop and now Tom's man "to keep things right" in the district's booze-and-broads business operations. A rival establishment has set up shop within Tom's fiefdom, and a singer there complicates the tense situation because she and Tom have a tricky past. This large predicament by necessity involves Francis, who, however, is fighting his own demons. The novel is centered on the issue of who has or does not have your back within a milieu in which almost anyone would just as soon knife you in the back. The authentic details from which Turner fashions this swiftly paced narrative perfectly conjure up the New Orleans atmosphere, which is at once peculiar in America and peculiarly American. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151014701
• ISBN 13: 9780151014705
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368