The Widow of Rampart Street

New Orleans does not sleep — it sweats. When the newspapers announce that Mrs. Alma Lafitte has buried a second wealthy husband before the age of thirty, the whole city whispers the word it dares not print: murderess. Then a frightened young woman, Claire Vasseur, arrives at Veronica Lakewood's hotel door with a darker fear — that Alma is about to marry again. Moving through the French Quarter's shuttered heat, its doctors who call poison "nerves," its wrought-iron balconies and buried grudges, Veronica Lakewood and her companion trace a pattern of small illnesses, generous wills, and a man with a medical bag who has just bought arsenic — and a question no one in polite society wants answered: is Alma Lafitte a killer, or a woman the world has already convicted for the crime of outliving the men who married her? The Widow of Rampart Street is an original Golden Age-style mystery about money, reputation, and the difference between a murderess and a legend.