Let the Devil Out

May 9, 2016
Loehfelm’s atmospheric but somewhat addled fourth outing for hard-charging New Orleans rookie cop Maureen Coughlin (after 2015’s Doing the Devil’s Work) finds the former cocktail waitress chafing during the final days of a suspension, self-medicating with whiskey to dull memories of the violent events that prompted her to leave her native New York a year earlier. She’s also disregarding the orders of her concerned supervisor, legendary Sgt. Preacher Boyd, to temporarily desist from digging into who recently shot up her home, especially any inquiries that might involve wealthy mover and shaker Solomon Heath. And Coughlin can’t resist trying to locate the prime suspect in the murders of two gun-running members of an extremist militia called the Watchmen Brigade. The action moves briskly through colorful Crescent City locales, but the plot, which involves shooting NOPD cops in ambushes, ends up making less sense than it should. Author tour. Agent: Barney Karpfinger, Karpfinger Agency.

May 15, 2016
In the fourth Maureen Coughlin book by New Orleans transplant Loehfelm, Coughlin is both licking her wounds from the events of Doing the Devil's Work (2015) and learning to "believe"--a word which represents hope for a city that's disaster prone.A quick catch-up: a militia group, the Sovereign Citizens, has come to New Orleans to raise a little hell. In Devil's Work, Coughlin shut them down and shed light on the doings of some dirty cops in the process. The militia shot up her apartment so thoroughly that there are still bullet holes in the headboard of her bed. As the new book begins, the department is investigating Coughlin. She's on suspension, and she's not taking her punishment lightly, but as an obsessive fueled by pure rage, she begins following men she thinks are potential rapists out of bars and beating them up before they can do any harm to the women who'd found them threatening. She's also still obsessed with the characters from the Sovereign Citizens--Madison Leary, a street person connected to the militia; the Heath family, who are certainly funding their activities; and Clayton Gage, their major strategist. Once Coughlin is reinstated, all hell really does break loose, in a frighteningly vivid and realistic domestic terror attack directed at the NOPD. What's most admirable about the series and elevates it over the average procedural is the nuanced evolution of a former Staten Island bartender into a New Orleans street cop.

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Starred review from May 1, 2016
On suspension from the New Orleans Police Department, thanks to fallout from the events of Doing the Devil's Work (2015), rookie cop Maureen Coughlin has been up to no good: pills, booze, and some very nasty vigilante work, tracking abusive men from bars and wailing on them with her special baton, going deep into the abyss inside her where the darkest things with the sharpest teeth lived and swam and hunted. Then she gets her badge back, largely because the FBI wants her help in tracking the Sovereign Citizens, the white-supremacist group with whom she tangled in the earlier book. The Citizens still want Maureen dead, but they're casting their net more widely, planning to declare open season on cops of all stripes. Will Maureen go rogue again or will she channel her killing feeling into doing the good police work her mentor, the veteran Preacher Boyd, knows she's capable of doingif she avoids winding up in jail herself. Not only has Loehfelm created the most compelling, complex patrol cop in the genrepart take-no-prisoners badass, part too-sensitive-for-the street rookiehe has also reenergized New Orleans as a setting for the best in crime fiction, going well beyond the cliches (no Cafe du Monde here) and nailing that rich Treme vibeedgy, dangerous, but pulsing with life. Maureen Coughlin is as good as it gets.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

February 15, 2016

In this fourth Maureen Coughlin novel, following Doing the Devil's Work (an IndieNext selection) and The Devil in Her Way (Strand magazine's top book of 2013), rookie New Orleans cop Maureen bangs headfirst into her adopted city's famed corruption. Breakout time for this author.

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