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Reviewed by:
  • Crescent City Countdown
  • Ashanti White (bio)
Gauthier, Ronald M. Crescent City Countdown. New Orleans: Jojo, 2007.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans with the force of a runaway train, causing fifty-three levee breaches and a flood that bordered on biblical proportions. When the winds ceased, eighty percent of the historic city was covered in [End Page 649] water. When the waters descended, over fourteen hundred souls had perished beneath the chaos of Katrina.

And then came the books. Less than a month had passed before nonfiction titles explaining what went wrong in New Orleans, on the Coast Guard heroes of the storm, and on the failure of Homeland Security overwhelmed bookstore shelves. It took much longer for fiction writers to discuss the storm, but they finally did, offering stories of those who slept for days on their rooftops, waiting for rescue against the threatening waters and the hunger and fear that tore at their sanity.

But people began to reconstruct New Orleans and as she slowly returns to a semblance of the luster that once defined her, New Orleans has become a case study, a brief tragedy in history, and the considerations progressively dwindled. Interests fell to the memoirs of those who survived the disaster; no one cared about the after. Solely for that reason, former New Orleans resident Ronald Gauthier’s third novel, Crescent City Countdown, which follows Hard Time on the Bayou and Prey for Me: A New Orleans Mystery, is a refreshingly contemporary yet revolutionary work of fiction. While other New Orleans writers, such as Erica Spindler and Brad Benischek, focus their works on the immediate impacts of Hurricane Katrina, Gauthier offers an intriguing novel that shatters the misinformed idea that New Orleans is back to normal by exposing the unspoken issues that have come to define the city.

Two years following Hurricane Katrina, as residents reemerged to New Orleans, a middle-aged, white woman entered the door of J & D Private Investigators searching for a conclusion to her son’s homicide. He was a hotel manager murdered in broad daylight, but the police, who are overburdened and underdeveloped, know little more than that. All that was certain was that no items were stolen from him, that the person who committed the crime was African-American, and that the witnesses to the crime fled the scene. The woman hoped that Jeannette Plaisance will be able to solve the mystery.

While the plot of Crescent City Countdown may seem a simplistic variation on the many murder mysteries published every year, Gauthier displays his dexterity as an intellectual storyteller by cleverly building an unyielding foundation on which to discuss the crime and lawlessness that has plagued New Orleans since the storm: “The crime rate in new Orleans had returned to its record-setting pace about six months after Hurricane Katrina. It returned miraculously with rigid force and callousness, growing daily, malignant, and baffling the police” (8).

The requested services of J & D Private Investigations also present the growing racial tensions that took place as displaced citizens returned to their hometown. Gauthier notes that service businesses were the quickest to rebound following Hurricane Katrina because “journalists, relief workers, emergency personnel and others from across the country filled all available hotels that were left standing and operable” (94). Despite the failure of many other companies—“the once proud owners found themselves working the 9 to 5 in totally different fields, far removed from their independence and freedom of entrepreneurship”—J & D Private Investigations flourished (5). While the company was created in the imagination of a writer, Gauthier successfully constructs a platform to expose the extreme distrust that New Orleans citizens held for the police even as crime burgeoned. It would seem that a city which has a tapered police force would not house a prosperous independent agency. However, the events that took place during the storm, including the Danziger Bridge shooting that left two unarmed men dead, caused many citizens to distrust officers, fueling the [End Page 650] necessity for such a company when families yearned for peace following misdeeds committed against them. That mistrust became ingrained in the community.

Perhaps the most intriguing...

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