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Down in the Flood is the third Kenneth Abel Danny Chaisson novel, and it is the book where the series achieves what it had been working toward. Danny is investigating a private deal between the senator's old camp and the Army Corps of Engineers over a piece of wetland that should have been designated for restoration and is instead being quietly slated for industrial use. The investigation reveals a long history of decisions that have made New Orleans less defensible against the kind of storm everyone has been warning about.
The book came out in 2005, the year of Katrina, with a publication date that put it on shelves while the city was still flooded. Abel had been writing about the precise political failures the storm would expose for the previous decade, and Down in the Flood is the most fully realized version of his argument.
Five stars. A prescient, beautifully written piece of regional crime fiction. The series is criminally underread and Down in the Flood is the entry that proves what it could do.
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