Postcard from Hell

The author of Bad Girl Blues returns with photographer Andy Derain leaving the rat race for carefree New Orleans and then the islands--and landing in the middle of drug smugglers, blackmail, high-speed motorboat chases, and deadly shootouts. 12,500 first printing.

New Orleans' Andy Derain (first seen in Bad Girl Blues), the photographer who fled from the New York City fashion scene, moves through a tale whose ragged, unresolved plot is nearly saved by rich atmosphere. When a gangster's son is killed, Andy takes some shots of the crime scene to sell to the tabloids. Instead of the small fortune he hoped for, Andy earns the wrath of the victim's father, Crayfish Joe Coquin. At the same time, Astrid Montebello, a onetime model turned fashion designer, sends him a postcard telling him of problems she's having in the Cayman Islands. After she disappears, Andy (partly to escape the claws of Crayfish Joe) decides to investigate and ends up pitted against some very cold-blooded drug dealers. Personal?as well as sleuthing?questions dog Andy: Should he stay with girlfriend Bleusette Lescault, the strikingly beautiful restaurateur and ex-hooker? Or should he pursue the exquisite Astrid? And what about Glory, the beautiful pilot? All this nubility lends an air of male fantasy to this tale, in which only Bleusette and the amiably corrupt New Orleans are entirely convincing.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Andy Derain, the burned-out fashion photographer introduced in Bad Girl Blues (1994), still hasn't escaped what he was running from when he abandoned New York for his childhood home in New Orleans. His relationship with former madam Blusette is balanced on the precipice of marriage, with both parties reluctant to commit. Then a postcard arrives from Hell, a resort town in the Grand Cayman Islands. The sender is Astrid, a close friend and model from Andy's past life, and she needs help. Short on funds, Andy hitches a ride on a drug run to the islands with a fearless pilot named Glory, whose employer is a vicious drug dealer named Fabio, who happens to be involved with the wife of the man bankrolling Astrid's new design house. The coincidences that roll all Andy's troubles into Fabio's sphere are a bit vexing, but in a novel where all the women are supermodels, dope dealers are vanquished by supermodels and FBI agents who could have been supermodels . . . well, anything's possible and, as it turns out, entertaining. Wes Lukowsky