Cold Steel Rain

Cold Steel Rain is the first of Kenneth Abel's Danny Chaisson novels and one of the great underread crime debuts of its decade. Danny is a young attorney working for a Louisiana state senator in the kind of capacity (driver, fixer, vote counter) that the official titles never describe. Cold Steel Rain opens with a routine errand that turns into a murder and ends with Danny realizing that the political family he has worked for is not what he had wanted to believe.

Abel writes New Orleans and the Louisiana political world with the kind of insider attention that makes James Lee Burke's work feel a little tourist-y by comparison. The senator's entourage, the Creole social hierarchy, the way the parish politics operate at the unincorporated edges of the city, all carry weight. The case unspools in the slow methodical way the form requires, and the moral pressure on Danny accumulates through dozens of small compromises.

The prose is the achievement. Abel writes with a particular tired-Louisiana voice that lands somewhere between Walker Percy and Ross Macdonald. The closing chapters earn their weight.

Five stars. One of the most overlooked crime debuts of the late 90s. Read this, and the next two, and then write to your favorite editor and ask why this series went out of print.