From the Edgar Award–winning author of Grief Street comes a Neil Hockaday mystery filled with a complex Creole stew of family secrets, sour politics, ritual murder, and bittersweet revenge.

While in New Orleans to meet the family of his new wife, actress Ruby Flagg, Neil Hockaday was expecting the good times to roll. Instead, Hock encounters the dankest pits of the big easy and demons of his own.

When Ruby’s cousin Perry Duclat is suspected of murdering his former cellmate at Angola penitentiary whose mutilated body was found branded with a bizarre acronym, MOMS, Hock teams up with a disenchanted New Orleans cop to conduct a highly unofficial investigation.

During his time in Louisiana, Hock faces a cast of only-in-New-Orleans characters, including a scamming alderman, hypnotic preacher, and a cryptic old jazz funeral man, Joe Never Smile, whose legendary horses weep tears when they pull hearses through the sad streets of an enigmatic city.