About the Author

Alice Slater is a writer and ex-bookseller from London. She studied creative writing at MMU and UEA. Her debut novel, Death of a Bookseller, was an instant Sunday Times bestseller. It won the Debut Crime Book of the Year Award at Capital Crime’s Fingerprint Awards 2024, shortlisted for CrimeFest’s Specsavers Best Debut Crime Novel Award 2023 and longlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2024. Alice co-hosts literary podcast What Page Are You On? and lives with her husband, their dog Peachy and a lot of books.

Also by Alice Slater

Death of a Bookseller

LET THE BAD TIMES ROLL

ALICE SLATER

www.hodder.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Hodder & Stoughton Limited

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Alice Slater 2025

The right of Alice Slater to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ebook ISBN 978 1 529 38539 7

Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.hodder.co.uk

For Alex,

from Leyton to Decatur

Like the tangled veins of cypress roots that meander this way and that in the swamp, everything in New Orleans is interrelated, wrapped around itself in ways that aren’t always obvious.

Under a Hoodoo Moon: The Life of the Night Tripper, Dr John Mac Rebennack

And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

Luke 15:23–24

Contents

About the Author

Also by Alice Slater

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

London: Caroline

London: Selina

London: Richard

New Orleans: Selina

London: Max

New Orleans: Selina

London: Sage

On the Road: Daniel

London: Caroline

New Orleans: Selina

London: Selina

New Orleans: Daniel

Epilogue London: Selina

Acknowledgements

London: Caroline

Caroline carried her meds in an antique silver pillbox that had belonged to her mother, even though she could never remember whether she’d taken them once the pills were popped from their blister packs. She kept her father’s old Zippo in her handbag, although she never had time to refill the gas. She surrounded herself with vintage paperbacks because she liked the familiar way her family’s library of broken spines looked on her shelves, but she preferred to scroll social media than read. Her flat was filled with the cassettes and CDs her parents used to pair with a cocktail on a Friday night, but she listened to music on her laptop. She lived her life through a sepia filter, nostalgic for a time she’d never really known, an era that belonged to a different generation. Aesthetics over practicalities. That was Caroline all over.

She planned Daniel’s dinner party with the same attention to detail.

Everything had to be perfect: a welcome-home feast for the weary traveller, a thirtieth-birthday celebration surrounded by friends. He’d be jet-lagged, of course, but Daniel always knew how to rise to an occasion, how to perform for a crowd. She could picture his face as he walked through the door, a look of confusion melting into recognition as each guest stepped forward in turn to relieve him of his heavy bags, to gather him into a warm, welcoming embrace, to press a cocktail into his hand. Caroline would remain seated, tranquil as a lily pad.

‘You’re just in time for dinner,’ she’d say, and he’d look at the New Orleans-themed menu and laugh at her cleverness as she swatted away his apologies.

‘How’d you know where to find me?’ he’d ask, and she’d smile.

‘In every life, I’ll always find you,’ she’d say.

They would drink champagne cocktails spiked with absinthe and stay up late while Daniel regaled them with tales of New Orleans. Maybe they’d even plan a trip together. He could take her to all the bars and restaurants he’d discovered in the city, and they could retrace his steps through the French Quarter side by side. Just the two of them.

She could see it all so clearly.

Caroline didn’t know much about New Orleans, so she spent an evening reading articles on the internet, watching informative videos made by earnest amateur foodies. She learned the difference between Cajun and Creole cuisine, po’ boys and muffulettas, étouffée and jambalaya. She learned that the famous Café du Monde coffee was flavoured with chicory, and the ‘holy trinity’ in Louisianan cooking was two parts sweet onion, one part celery and one part green pepper.

She also learned that New Orleans had the third-highest murder rate of all US cities, trailing behind St Louis and Baltimore, and that Louisiana was home to an above-average number of missing persons. Is that why Daniel chose to spirit away to New Orleans? Did it feel like an easy place for a man to disappear?

Caroline’s menu came together easily once she understood the culinary landscape of the city. Grilled oysters to start, that was a given. Caroline loved oysters, loved their solitude, their hard exteriors, the secrecy of the full-moon pearls hidden within their soft folds.

For the main course, a seafood gumbo seemed simple enough, served over a scoop of white rice and topped with a tangle of chopped spring onion. A warm, spiced stew – comfort in a bowl.

Dessert had to be something rich and decadent. She considered strawberry shortcake, but settled on the pomp and circumstance of bananas Foster flambéed at the table. With its swirl of rum caramel and melted ice cream, it would be the perfect sweet treat to counterbalance the savoury main.

A Sazerac felt like the classic way to end a feast in New Orleans, but in her heart, in her gut, she knew she must finish with the morbidity of a Death in the Afternoon. Champagne spiked with sugar and absinthe, a taste of green reflections, hallucinations, a legacy of poets and artists touched by madness.

She had the perfect dinner set on hand – the silver-trimmed china from their parents’ wedding – but she needed crystal rocks glasses for the aperitifs and champagne flutes for the digestifs. Rattan placemats, organic cotton napkins in deep purple, stitched with gold stars. Delicate oyster forks, green candlesticks pushed into vintage glass bottles, an antique silver chiller to keep the champagne cool.

On Daniel’s birthday, Caroline went shopping. She could have procured everything online, but she rather liked the ritualistic process of handpicking each item, although she felt like a housewife trotting around the shops; a Stepford wife with a bright, uncanny smile.

Spanish crisps flavoured with black truffle and a tin of spiced Gordal olives from the deli. A dozen fresh oysters and a heavy bag of fat king prawns from the fishmonger. A fistful of fresh herbs, aromatic as a bride’s bouquet, an assortment of vegetables, and a hand of bananas from the greengrocer. Vanilla ice cream, brown sugar, dark rum. Aesop handwash for the bathroom; a Diptyque candle to perfume the air of the flat, to overpower the fragrance of the feast as it came together in the kitchen.

Flowers: she needed flowers, too. Magnolias would be ideal, but she couldn’t find any in the local florist, so she settled for a spray of gypsophila instead. Simple, classic.

As she lugged her bounty back to the flat, she felt less like a Stepford wife and more like a scullery maid. The tote bags slid off her shoulders and dug into the palms of her hands, left long red welts as though she’d spent a significant number of hours tied up, left to rot in the boot of a car by a kidnapper. The bright sun burned her eyes, the healed hairline fracture in her tibia ached, and her left shoe gound against her heel, rubbed the skin raw and left a bloody stain on the leather.

The canal was desolate, the water a dark quagmire. Against her better judgement, she had decided to take a shortcut along the canal towpath, which she usually avoided because, even after all these years, she still felt a distinct paranoia about returning to the scene of her first (and, arguably, worst) crime.

The towpath was busy with a crowd of young professionals hanging out by the waters’ edge, drinking pints from the trendy canal-side bar and making the most of the first warm day of the year. Some were cooling off by dipping their feet into the water, jeans rolled up to their knees. Vile. Caroline would never submerge so much as a toenail in there. She’d seen the rotten jetsam that collected at the locks, a reeking stew of plastic bottles, crisp packets and scum that baked all day in the sun. She knew what dark histories lurked beneath the water’s surface.

The flat was cold and dark. Without Daniel, it felt barren, unlived in. She missed his music, the sound of his voice as he sent endless voice notes to his friends, the sweet smell of Santal 33 as he readied himself for a night out.

It was unthinkable to imagine he might never set foot in here again, might never put away his clean socks on the radiator, might never finish the half-read paperback balanced on the arm of the sofa. No – he would be back in time for dinner. That’s what she’d said; that was the deal.

She snapped on the lights, banished the shadows from every corner. As she unpacked her shopping, Caroline listened to the footsteps and music through the floorboards overhead. Her upstairs neighbours were dinner-party people. The savoury scent of their cooking – onions softening in butter, perhaps – dominated the air, and she lit the Diptyque candle to freshen the space. She imagined one pouring wine, the other stirring a Le Creuset of risotto or rigatoni alla vodka. Later, one might dip her wooden spoon into the bubbling dish, and the other might boogey over, her bare feet slapping against the lino, for a taste.

Earlier, they’d played a mix of milquetoast pop, like Fleetwood Mac and ABBA, but now their soundtrack was a lively jazz. If Caroline believed in good omens, which she categorically did not, this would feel like a sign. A nod of encouragement, an endorsement from the universe. Instead, it served as nothing but inspiration: jazz would be the perfect background music to Daniel’s dinner party, and she searched the internet for a New Orleans-inspired playlist.

She swept and hoovered, washed the fruit and veg, arranged the flowers in a couple of clean Bonne Maman jam jars and lit more candles. Then she poured the last of a bottle of Sancerre into a glass and took her place at the table to wait.

Her phone rang, the number unknown. Perhaps it was Daniel, letting her know he’d landed safely at Heathrow. She answered the call with a cheerful, ‘Hello, darling – is that you?’

London: Selina

One week later

Caroline’s invitation wasn’t much of a surprise. I’d been seeing a lot of signs in the week since I’d returned home from New Orleans. A pale feather caught in my hair. A cabbage white fluttering in the garden. An empty snail’s shell on my doorstep, bleached cream by the sun and no bigger than a thumbnail. White was Daniel’s colour, the colour of his shirt, his sunglasses, his vape. Lilies, daisy petals, dandelion seeds. The papery bark of the silver birch. Pearls, the palest sand, bone. It was him; it was always him. It was Daniel reaching out to me, leaving signs to remind me that he was still there, he was still with me, and that I would never be free.

New Orleans was still with me, too. The hum of a bluebottle could be the drone of a sun-drunk mosquito. The light breeze that rattled the leaves of the plane trees could be stirring the branches of the magnolia in the hostel courtyard. A distant pneumatic drill was the dull, melodious whirr of hidden cicadas, and the base note of damp concrete lacked only the top note of spilled rum to complete the perfume of the Big Easy.

In the supermarket, I caught myself looking for the flavours of the city, but the few things that reminded me of my brief time in New Orleans – oysters, absinthe, champagne – felt too ostentatious to bring to an evening like this. It would be a sombre affair, with a simple, wholesome meal at its centre. Something that involved meditative chopping and stirring, minimal clean-up. Wine was the obvious choice, but I worried about showing up with a bottle of red in the face of a delicate saffron-infused risotto, or a white to contend with a rich spaghetti bolognese. A bottle of fizz was probably the safe option for a regular dinner party, but this was no ordinary invitation to dinner.

The crash of broken glass snapped me from my reverie. A woman stood over the crime scene – a bottle had slipped from her grasp and smashed, sending a spatter of red wine all over the plasticky floor, across the white toes of her Converse and up the legs of her jeans.

It was a sign.

Red wine was Daniel’s poison. In the muggy heat of the city, I couldn’t stand it – room-temperature Merlot held an uncanny resemblance to blood on the tongue – but it was the right choice. I settled on a mid-price bottle of Shiraz, and my hands shook as I fumbled with my phone to pay for it.

Since arriving home, I’d spent so much energy avoiding the topic of New Orleans, it was almost overwhelming to think that I was about to spend an entire evening talking about it. I wanted to talk about New Orleans, though. I did. I wanted to talk about the cocktails I’d drunk, the meals I’d eaten. I wanted to talk about the quality of the air, the dampness of it, the way it curled my hair and made my skin glow. I wanted to talk about Bourbon Street, with its bright lights, cacophony of music and tacky gift shops. The Spanish moss tumbling in knots from the trees like the weather-worn Mardi Gras beads that were draped from so many street signs and railings all over the French Quarter.

These people wouldn’t be interested in any of that, though. That wasn’t the story they wanted me to tell. They didn’t want to hear about the jazz or the drinks or the weather. They wanted to hear about what happened next.

They wanted to know what happened to Daniel.

Menu

Aperitif

Sazerac

Appetiser

Charbroiled Oysters

Entrée

Seafood Gumbo

Dessert

Bananas Foster

Digestif

Death in the Afternoon

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Aperitif

Sazerac

Known as the oldest cocktail in America, the Sazerac carries the history of New Orleans in its signature blend of rye whiskey, sugar and Peychaud’s bitters. Served in a chilled rocks glass licked with absinthe.