What's in this book
- Kenneth Abel's 2003 follow-up - Danny Chaisson, now an attorney in private practice, after Hurricane Katrina
- Set in post-Katrina New Orleans; one of the earlier contemporary literary crime novels about the storm
- 320 pages of patient procedural texture about post-storm Louisiana legal and political reconstruction
- Third volume of the Chaisson series; can be read alongside Cold Steel Rain
- For readers of the broader Chaisson series, James Lee Burke, and contemporary Southern crime fiction
- A canonical entry in the post-Katrina literary American crime tradition
Buy this book
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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.
Related reads
If you liked Down in the Flood
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The Burying Field
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