The theme of loss runs like a river throughout the book, its tributaries flooding each scene and every character. The detective does not share her faith or her ethics, and this makes me resist the idea of them sharing a bed. Henry’s need to make it work conflicts with her own creation of Dumond as a conscientious, boundary-respecting, serious priestess. I struggled to find this believable beyond the error of a past fling, and Dumond’s friends and neighbors agree. This imbalance between hard truth and softer desire is repeated in Mambo Dumond’s conflicted relationship with her detective ex-boyfriend. There was a chance to stand tall and shout loud, and Henry leaves it at a whisper. I felt she pulled her punches with this angle after introducing it, and this weakened her climax. New Orleans is a city still reeling from racial trauma, and Henry weaves this truth between her fiction. This could all be mistaken as a cozy mystery, but the roots of the violence, blooming small flowers of murder, are deeper in nature. Will she find the answers before the murderer finds her?

This escalation creates a sense of time running out and deepens the tension. The more people threaten her to stay out of it, the more she can’t let it go.

The police version of events doesn’t add up, and so she sets out to find the real killer and defend her religion. Mambo Dumond’s faith and sense of justice won’t let her do the same. When a fellow vodouisant priestess is arrested for murder, the local Vodou elite turn their backs on the woman. She makes charms, potions, and poppets for clients, but also listens to their problems and steers them to rely on themselves first. She balances the need to pay her bills with her respect for the powers given to her by her lwa, Erzulie. Mambo Reina Dumond works from Le Petit Temple, a Vodou business she’s built from the ground up after being trained by her Haitian father.

(I originally assumed this book was self-published due to the surprisingly neutral and forgettable cover for the ebook 47North turns out to be an imprint of Amazon Publishing, and they offer their acquistions through Kindle Unlimited-which is how I found it-as well as paperback and audio editions.) This second book is a departure for Henry from the dark fantasy of an evil carnival, and instead brings characters who could easily be found during a walk through your city, and a murder that feels ripped from the headlines. Unlike many past representations of Vodou, Henry focuses on the history and faith, and leaves the fetishization behind. Henry is not from New Orleans and does not practice Vodou, but she consulted experts for both, and this careful consideration shines in details and authorial voice in her mystery novel The Quarter Storm. Henry, The Quarter Storm ( Mambo Reina #1).

The quarter storm veronica henry