'Nothing stays dead in New Orleans. Not for long, anyway.' And no one knows this better than ex district attorney Danny Chaisson. For him, the dead just show up in his bathroom mirror every morning, staring back at him with tired eyes. Several years previously, he stumbled from the straight and narrow path, and now he's the legman for Jimmy Boudrieux, speaker of the Louisiana House of Representatives, for whom dirty dealing is more than a way of life, but the sole means of survival. So when Danny makes his regular pick up (a briefcase full of hand guns) at a down town Vietnamese restaurant belonging to his friends, and returns a few minutes later to find that they, along with the rest of their clientele, have been shot dead at point blank range, he knows that he's in trouble; the next bullet has his name on it. And Danny realises that nobody least of all Jimmy Boudrieux or the bent cops who control the New Orleans police department - is going to lift a finger to help him. Bleak, authentic, gritty, redolent with atmosphere, COLD STEEL RAIN is a class act. Certain to appeal to fans of Robicheaux and James Lee Burke, its hard inner city edge - its depiction of urban corruption post Huey Long - looks to Lawrence Block.