Author Information
Julie Smith's Latest Book

Newest Release

  • Bibliography:
    30 Books (4 Series)
  • First Book:
    January 1982
  • Latest Book:
    October 2019
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Full Series List in Order

Paul MacDonald

1 - True-Life Adventure (May-1985)
2 - Huckleberry Fiend (Sep-1987)

Rebecca Schwartz

1 - Death Turns a Trick (1982)
2 - The Sourdough Wars (1984)
3 - Tourist Trap (1986)
4 - Dead in the Water (Oct-1991)
5 - Other People's Skeletons (Oct-1993)

A Skip Langdon Novel

1 - New Orleans Mourning (Feb-1990)
2 - The Axeman's Jazz (Sep-1991)
3 - Jazz Funeral (Apr-1993)
4 - New Orleans Beat // Death Before Facebook (Jun-1994)
5 - House of Blues (Jun-1995)
6 - The Kindness of Strangers (Jul-1996)
7 - Crescent City Kill // Crescent City Connection (Aug-1997)
8 - 82 Desire (Aug-1998)
9 - Mean Woman Blues (Aug-2003)
10 - Murder On Magazine (Mar-2018)
11 - The Big Crazy (Oct-2019)

Talba Wallis

1 - Louisiana Hotshot (May-2001)
2 - Louisiana Bigshot (Aug-2002)
3 - Louisiana Lament (Jul-2004)
4 - P.I. on a Hot Tin Roof (Jul-2005)

Book List in Order: 30 titles



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    It's one thing to represent hookers in court and quite another to play piano for fun at a feminist bordello. So when San Francisco attorney Rebecca Schwartz barely escapes a police raid, she has only herself to blame. But it's not over yet. By the ti...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Thanks to front-page coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle, everyone knows about the upcoming auction of the Martinelli family's renowned sourdough starter. No one anticipates the outcome: the auction will never take place, because handsome Peter M...



  • Paul McDonald was upset: first his boss drops dead in his living room, then someone breaks into his home and later torches it. How is he supposed to write a bestselling mystery surrounded by all this crime? Paul worked part-time for Jack Birnbaum, r...



    • / Law Enforcement
    • Buy Buy

    Easter morning dawns foggy--and deadly--in San Francisco when attorney/ sleuth Rebecca Schwartz and her journalist friend Rob Burns make a gruesome discovery. The large cross erected for a mountaintop sunrise service is burdened with a crucified corp...



  • The lines were written in a large, expressive hand. The paper was yellowed and antique. There was lots of paper under that first sheet and more in another shoebox sitting on Paul McDonald's secondhand coffee table. What McDonald had, courtesy of h...



  • FESTIVAL OF MURDER It's Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and as the gaudy Rex parade proceeds down St. Charles Avenue, hysterical revelers crowd the street to see the King of Carnival. This year he's the prominent Chauncey St. Amant: upper-crust, yet do...



  • In hundreds of anonymous self-help groups, New Orleans's restless young and not so young search for love, self-esteem, freedom from addictions, a quick roll in the hay, the lost inner child, you name it. Enter the Axeman, a 1990s reincarnation of th...



  • SET SAIL Attorney and exotic fish fancier Rebecca Schwartz is looking forward to relaxing in picturesque Monterey, California, with her friend Marty, and visiting the world-famous aquarium where Marty works. But the peace is soon shattered.... MU...



  • Homicide detective Skip Langdon finds herself smack in the middle of a sweltering New Orleans summer with a most unenviable case: the stabbing death of the universally beloved producer of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. But it's not on...






  • Even Rebecca Schwartz (who's seen a lot) is nonplussed when she learns that Chris Nicholson, her law partner and best friend, is a suspect in a murder case. But that's not the half of it. Chris says she has an alibi, but she won't say what it is. ...



  • An unclassified death on the coroner's daily record is nothing special: a healthy young man found dead after an apparent fall from a ladder. Yet in a neglected old house set inside a jungle of greenery, Detective Skip Langdon listens to an unusually ...



  • After prominent New Orleans restaurateur Arthur Hebert is murdered in his beautiful Garden District home, three family members suspiciously vanish: Hebert's daughter, who was soon to have taken over the management of his restaurant, his ex-addict son...



  • On temporary leave of absence from the force, Police Detective Skip Langdon becomes obsessed with exposing the frightening figure beneath the good-guy image of Errol Jacomine -- a liberal-minded, civic-spirited preacher who is running for mayor of Ne...



  • Who or what is The Jury? To her horror, NOPD detective Skip Langdon discovers it is a new, national, fast-growing, and very volatile organization headquartered in New Orleans. Its mission: to execute those who have "escaped" prosecution. What's mo...



  • Councilwoman Bebe Fortier has misplaced her equally prominent husband. Across town, part-time detective-poet Talba Wallis has a simple wish--to find out what Russell Fortier's disappearance has to do with her. But the private investigator who hired T...



  • In the introduction to her first story collection, Edgar Award winner Smith (82 Desire) muses that crime happens on the mean streets but that criminals are forged indoors, in the mean rooms of the title. These stories are not tidy whodunits but offer...



  • Meet the snazziest P.I. in the land. Not by accident does she roam America's jazziest city, New Orleans. By day she is Talba Wallis: smart, sassy, ebony, and a fledgling detective. By night she is the Baroness Pontalba: poet laureate of the city's sm...



  • By night the glamorous Baroness de Pontalba, by day New Orleans' hippest P.I., Talba Wallis is dumbfounded when she can't do a simple background check on an old friend--Babalu Maya just doesn't seem to exist on paper. Four days later, she doesn't exi...



  • A Skip Langdon Novel

    Nemesis: the rival fate never allows you to beat.

    The nemesis of Skip Langdon, New Orleans police detective, is Errol Jacomine. This evangelical preacher has been leader of his own frenzied army of converts, has run...






  • WHEN DEALING WITH THE RICH... On the banks of the scenic Truxton River, nestled in rolling woodlands just minutes away from our nation's capital, lies Gryphon Gate, a premier gated community. But tempers flare and tension grows when someone decides ...



  • Allyson Brown, the Girl Gatsby, is a woman of wealth, hostess of fabled parties, patron of the arts--especially of poets. Found floating in her own swimming pool, shot to death.

    Poet and fledgling detective Talba Wallis gets an urgent call fro...



  • When PI Talba Wallis gets a frantic phone call from Orleans Parish Prison, the last person she expects to hear from is her boss's lawyer daughter, Angie. Popped for drug possession, Angie insists the drugs were planted. She's a target for representin...



  • September 11th, 2006. I Have a Dream, is a touching, fictional story about a fifth grade girl who was entering an Upper Elementary School. Every year when it was time to return to school, she had to face her biggest fear: September 11th, 2001. She re...



  • Budding-psychic Reeno is the most accomplished teenage burglar in California, but one tiny screw-up and poof! -- she's sentenced to Bad Girl School. And that isn’t even her worst problem. Her sister Haley’s dying of an illness no one can diagnose...



  • Hearts for the Homeless is an extraordinary book about a young boy's journey into homelessness. He experienced a life of luxury until fate took the life that he had known away. He had to learn how to cope with living in a homeless shelter as well as ...







  • Waking up early and discovering that your breakfast foods have visitors is no way to start off the day! In this hilariously annotated book, you will take a journey with a child facing prickly dilemmas that will leave you itching to get to the next...



  • The TENTH installment of the Skip Langdon series is a New Orleans feast for the senses, a canine love story, an action-packed police procedural made-to-order for readers who like their female sleuths bold, smart, and refreshingly human. A serial k...






  • August 29, 2005 - Doomsday: New Orleans is eighty per cent underwater, with no electricity, no phones, no 911 service, no rules. Facing the complete breakdown of systems and normality, New Orleans homicide Detective Skip Langdon is on her own to i...


Award-Winning Books by Julie Smith

New Orleans Mourning
1991 Edgar Allan Poe Award -- Novel


Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Julie Smith has published 30 books.

Julie Smith does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, The Big Crazy, was published in October 2019.

The first book by Julie Smith, Death Turns a Trick, was published in January 1982.

Yes. Julie Smith has 4 series.