Doing the Devil's Work

Starred review from December 1, 2014
Loehfelm's third crime novel featuring the marvelously complex New Orleans police officer Maureen Coughlin (after 2013's The Devil in Her Way) is every bit as good as its standout predecessors, and provides fresh evidence that Maureen merits a long literary life. While Maureen is on routine patrol in a seedy part of town, a sickening smell leads her to the corpse of a white male with his throat slit, in a house that turns out to belong to Caleb Heath, who's the son of a major power broker. Caleb disclaims any knowledge of the dead man, whose body bears a tattoo used by neo-Nazis, and who is subsequently identified as Edgar Cooley, a federal fugitive. The investigation, which may implicate fellow cops, takes several unexpected turns, and Maureen finds herself in morally compromising positions. The often lyrical prose will remind many of the grim, hard-edged style of James Ellroy

Starred review from December 15, 2014
In the latest volume of Loehfelm's Maureen Coughlin series, the ambitious protagonist, now a rookie cop, tangles with some scary homegrown militia types called the Sovereign Citizens. Coughlin is determined to make her mark in the New Orleans PD, which means she's bound to ruffle some good ol' boy feathers. As was made clear in Loehfelm's earlier Coughlin novels-The Devil She Knows (2011) and The Devil in Her Way (2013)-our heroine has both a strong will and a finely tuned moral compass. So when her fellow officers fudge some evidence at a traffic stop and one of her suspects is mysteriously lost by the sheriff's department, Coughlin is going to get to the bottom of what's going on-even if it implicates one of the most powerful families in town in a gunrunning, cop-hating militia group. Loehfelm has created a wonderfully flawed heroine in Coughlin, who began as a Staten Island cocktail waitress with a nose for trouble. Her move south mirrors Loehfelm's own, and his love for New Orleans is evident in his descriptions, from the greasy spoon the cops favor for gumbo to the rollicking frat bars of the French Quarter. Dialogue doesn't get much snappier, and the complicated plot (which not only introduces the militia group, but resolves the fate of the despicable murderer Scales from Way) is deftly handled. This series just keeps getting better.

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Starred review from January 1, 2015
Staten Island cocktail waitress turned New Orleans cop Maureen Coughlin returns in her third outing (following The Devil in Her Way, 2013). A officer's daily patrolling can go wrong in an instant, as Coughlin's does when she makes a routine traffic stop and is quickly ensnared in just the kind of escalating case a rookie cop wants to avoid: from murder to domestic terrorism to rampant police corruption. As he's shown in the earlier installments in this series, Loehfelm has a real feel for capturing the nearly impenetrable culture of the NOPD; Coughlin needs all the help she can get to avoid becoming the fall guy in a case no one wants to touch, but whom can she trust? As impressive as his ability to evoke a sense of place is Loehfelm's creation of a lead character of such remarkable depth and complexity. Equal parts toughness, vulnerability, navet', and street smarts, Coughlin has clearly established herself as one of the most compelling crime-fiction protagonists to appear in the last five years. She has something of the brashness of Carol O'Connell's Kathy Mallory but is not nearly as loose a cannon; at the same time, her combination of determination and insecurity suggests Lucie Soto, another rookie cop, who shared the lead with Harry Bosch in Michael Connelly's The Burning Room (2014). Above all, though, she is one of a kind. There is no more fascinating beat cop in crime fiction, and when Coughlin earns her detective shield, the genre's A-list stars better start watching their backs.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)