P.I. on a Hot Tin Roof: A Talba Wallis Novel (Talba Wallis Novels) [Hardcover]

If you love New Orleans then you'll adore Talba Wallis. Cavorting through steamy streets and steamier local characters, Julie Smith puts a sharp focus on the Big Easy's charm. This mystery is a keep you up all night read so start it on a weekend when you can sleep in.

This review is for the Tom Doherty Associates hardback edition published in August 2005, 304 pages. Julie Smith has written twenty novels in four mystery series. The protagonists are Rebecca Schwartz, Paul McDonald, Skip Langdon and Talba Wallis. P. I. ON A HOT TIN ROOF is the fourth novel in the Talba Wallis series. You can become acquainted with the author and her stories at www.JulieSmithAuthor.com.

Talba Wallis is young, black, a computer genius-hacker who, by day, wearing white blouse and navy blue skirt, works as a private eye in New Orleans. At night, wearing colorful silks and a turban, and using the nom de plume "Baroness de Pontalba," she reads her poetry at the Reggie and Chaz restaurant/bar in the French Quarter. Talba lives with her nagging mom, "Miz Clara," who cleaned white folk's homes to put her two kids through college. Corry, Talba's brother, is a doctor, the least of Miz Clara's favored careers for her children (the others being Speaker of the House and President) so Talba being a PI is a bit of a disappointment. Darryl, Talba's boyfriend, is a high school teacher, musician, and sometime bartender supporting his out-of-wedlock daughter. With these down-to-earth characters, Smith weaves entertaining tales with resonant dialogue and vivid descriptions of New Orleans and nearby places.

This episode begins with Talba's lawyer girlfriend being tossed in jail along with her client on trumped up drug charges. It appears that Buddy Champagne, a judge, framed them. Talba assists by maneuvering her way into the Champagne household as a maid to get the goods on the crooked judge.

Much of the first part of the story is set in the Champagne mansion so the reader gets to know the widower Judge, his young girlfriend, his mother-in-law who runs the house, his son and his son's wife who live with him, and his fourteen year old daughter, Lucy. Talba befriends the family, gets the goods on the judge and exposes the old coot. Shortly after the story breaks in the paper, though, the judge is murdered. His girlfriend hires Talba to find out who done it.

Smith's mysteries are not convoluted, plot twisters laden with subtle clues and littered with dead bodies. They are as much character driven as plot driven, and are rich with the culture and ambiance of New Orleans and its surroundings. In this story, Talba briefly gets outside the city to Venetian Isles and later across Lake Ponchartrain to Covington and Mandeville.

P. I. ON A HOT TIN ROOF deals with familial emotions and conflicts, within the Champagne household and between Talba and her mother, her boyfriend's daughter, and particularly with the Judge's daughter. Talba nurtures Lucy's talent for poetry. In the prologue, a long poem introduces the story, and there are a few other poems by Talba and especially by Lucy that deal with her emotions.

With the well-drawn cultural and familial motifs, the story is the most credible mystery I've read.

This is now the third of the Talba Wallis series. I like Julie Smith - especially Skip Langdon series, also set in New Orleans, and the Rebecca Schwartz series.

That's why I've kept up with Talba Wallis books but I find P. I. on a Hot Tin Roof to be a marginally interesting book. The threads of the story have promise but seem to get mired down in detail, complicated by Talba's other life as a poetess, writing/reading as "Baroness de Pontalba". In all, I found this book to be a slow, rather stilted effort, in which the "mystery" almost is lost in all the attempts at portraying the idiocyncratic behavior of the multitude of characters, none of whom comes across with much force or depth. Maybe it's what seems to me to the self-consciousness of a white woman trying to write in a young black woman's voice. It's an OK read but I wouldn't put it at the top of your list.