The Axeman's Jazz

In hundreds of anonymous self-help groups, New Orleans's restless young and not so young search for love, self-esteem, freedom from addictions, a quick roll in the hay, the lost inner child, you name it. Enter the Axeman, a 1990s reincarnation of the city's notorious serial killer of seventy years ago. Pretty Linda Lee Strickland, strangled in her own apartment, is the first victim.

For detective Skip Langdon, cheated of a romantic vacation by the killing, the case is a bummer. Yet as she threads her fascinated way from one self-help group to another, she finds she has more in common with the twelve-steppers than just the murder. And she knows what they do not: that among their anonymous numbers is a deadly dangerous, and dangerously attractive, psychopath....