Neutral Ground

He stopped to help a stranger with a flat tire. She was the reason his son was gone.

It's the Saturday before Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and Teo Trepagnier is doing everything right. Three months out of Angola after six years for an armed robbery he never once talked about, he changes tires under the Claiborne overpass, checks in with his parole officer, and sews his late grandfather's Mardi Gras Indian suit by hand every morning at five, one bead at a time. He has finally won back custody of his eight-year-old son, Bass. Today they're going to the parade.

Then a woman waves him down at a red light. Her tire is flat. Teo has never driven past a flat in his life.

By the time he notices her valve cap is missing, his car is gone. So is Bass.

The man behind it is Alcide "Deacon" Rillieux: church usher, check-cashing king of the Seventh Ward, and the most patient criminal in New Orleans. He wants $250,000 by midnight on Fat Tuesday. It's the money from the Gentilly job, the money Deacon believes Teo hid while he did his time. Teo never had it. Deacon doesn't care.

Teo has one strike left, a detective who has been watching him for six years, and four days. And he has the woman with the flat tire.

Coralie "Cookie" Boutte is a con artist from the Lower Ninth Ward with quick hands, a quicker mouth, and a seventeen-year-old sister drowning in a debt Deacon refuses to forgive. She swears she was a victim. She also knows exactly where Deacon keeps his Carnival cash: a check-cashing store on Elysian Fields, a krewe ball on St. Charles Avenue in the middle of the Bacchus parade, and a Treme social club on Fat Tuesday. If Teo can't pay Deacon, Cookie says, he can rob him and hand him back his own money.

What follows is a desperate Carnival heist through the heart of New Orleans: a fake crying jag at a cash counter, a waiter's vest and a gunshot at a masked ball, a stolen car crashing a parade barricade in front of a three-story dragon float. The rain floods the streets, the money goes in Cookie's grandmother's deep freezer, and the clock keeps running toward midnight.

And in a narrow shotgun house on Pauger Street, two people who survived Hurricane Katrina in very different ways start to fall for each other. Teo, who let go of his grandfather's hand in the floodwater at twelve and has carried everything alone ever since. Cookie, who spent two days tied to a roof vent waiting for a mother who never came back, and who has never told a soul what happened on that roof.

But Cookie is still lying to him. And when the truth comes out on Fat Tuesday, with Teo's Black Masking Indian tribe walking the streets of Treme and his son locked in a back room, it will decide whether Teo can trust the one person he finally let in.

Neutral Ground is a gripping New Orleans crime thriller, a Mardi Gras heist novel, and a slow-burning second-chance romance. Fans of literary crime fiction, Black Southern fiction, and suspense rooted in real places will find a story about fathers and sons, debts and loyalty, grief and redemption, and what people will risk to bring someone home.

For readers who want a thriller with heart, a love story with stakes, and a New Orleans that feels like home.