cover image LaStanza: New Orleans Police Stories

LaStanza: New Orleans Police Stories

O'Neil Denoux. Pontalba Press, $19.95 (326pp) ISBN 978-1-891643-73-6

DeNoux's series character, New Orleans homicide detective Dino LaStanza, is featured in a collection of gritty noir short stories. (The last novel in which LaStanza appeared was 1988's The Big Show.) Like his protagonist, DeNoux has been a New Orleans police detective, and his years of grim experience in a city with a soaring murder rate are reflected in these dark tales of life on the very mean streets. These stories are not only hardboiled: they are raunchy, violent and filled with obscenities. Each short narrative follows one of LaStanza's cases. The tales are unremittingly bleak: a beautiful young woman commits suicide; a jogger is attacked by a gang; an elderly woman is killed by random gunfire. Unfortunately, DeNoux's prose is labored and stiff, his characters are cardboard and his plots are thin and predictable. The best hard-boiled writing compresses powerful emotion into tight, minimalist prose. While these stories display plenty of tough attitude, there's not a lot of feeling in De Noux's choppy sentences. (Nov.)