Ghosts of White Raven Estate (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781495412950)

In 1963 my family moved from Southern California to Slidell, Louisiana across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans; I was thirteen. Our first few years in Slidell we lived on the edge of a swamp, off Magnolia Road. Alligators, armadillos, and snapping turtles made frequent crossings to the wetlands through our yard. We rented from a Cajun family who invited us over every Sunday afternoon for a crawdad feed and lots of beer. I was thirteen when I started drinking. I was fourteen when hurricane Hilda, a Category 4 storm, crashed into New Orleans causing widespread flooding, devastation, and death. The element of Hilda that I remember most vividly was the 'train-barrelling full speed into the house' eardrum bursting noise. Wrapped in blankets, and huddling in the bathtub, my siblings and I could NOT hear one instructive thing my mother was yelling at us as my non-plussed father snored in the other room. I was fifteen when I got my driver's license and keys to my dad's 1965 Mustang. I made a barreling beeline across the Lake Pontchartrain bridge to the jazz clubs on Bourbon Street. The bouncer carded me and my girlfriends at Al Hirt's Club, so it was off to Pete Fountain's which wasn't as particular about who they let in to their club. That was also the year I discovered the Tarot card parlors in the French Quarter and was convinced of the authenticity of fortune telling. You see, I had a crush on a tall blond kid whose dad owned the radio station in Slidell. My swain was Blakey Adams. During my first Tarot reading the fortune teller--a Caribbean woman dressed in glorious color, bangle jewelry, and a sparkling headwrap told me that I was in love with a boy whose initials were B. A. (I swear to you, Dear Reader, this is true.) I was bowled over and thereafter sold on everything that New Orleans had to offer--the marques, the lights, the alcohol, the jazz clubs--and the ghost stories. That love for The Big Easy has lasted now for fifty years - 1963 to 2013 - so why NOT write a novel that features mon amore--New Orleans.