I read the first Valentin St. Cyr mystery a dozen years ago and meant to read this soon thereafter, but other books claimed my attention, and I didn't get to this until now. Which does not mean I didn't find the first compelling. I loved it, and in reading this sequel, I fell in love with Valentin all over again. A Creole detective who usually passes for white in 1908 New Orleans, Valentin is coaxed by Jelly Roll Morton (one of the cast of characters based on real people) into investigating the deaths of two jass (as jazz was called back then) musicians. At first, Valentin is skeptical that there's a connection, but when a third musician is found dead, a pattern emerges. The more he investigates, the more pushback he receive from a local police lieutenant and from Valentin's boss Tom Anderson, the politically connected "King of Storyville," the district where prostitution was legal.

Fulmer has a way of bringing both his characters and early-20th Century New Orleans to life. That I figured out one part of the puzzle before it was revealed just made the resolution of the mystery more satisfying for me. ( )

Even though I read these books out of order, it didn't diminish the wonderful story about "Storyville". and Jass. ( )

A mixed bag. The descriptions of N.O. and the time period were fascinating. I love the setting and felt like I was a part of it. Fans of the Ken Burns "Jazz" series may enjoy it. The detective story, on the other hand, was a little ragged. It wasn't great and seemed like an afterthought to the story of Valentin St. Cyr hanging out in New Orleans. ( )

Read this because historic New Orleans was the setting. Overall, a quick comfortable read with an interesting mystery involving early jazz age musicians. I don't know much about Storyville nor the era (which I had difficulty pinpointing), but did get a general sense of the culture and locale. Not enough depth in characterization or setting to make a very satisfying and memorable read, but could be excellent with more development.

Just learned that this is not the author's first book about New Orleans. FHI: The oak trees notable for creating the ambience of New Orleans are "live oaks" and only lose their leaves as they are replaced by new leaves, so they would provide shelter from the rain during any season. New Orleans is not nor has ever been considered Cajun territory. Boudin, a Cajun sausage, would likely have been difficult to find there prior to the 1970s. ( )

The showy pretence of David Fulmer's new mystery novel Jass, set in 1908 New Orleans, begins with the title. Why, we wonder, weren't those s's replaced by z's? Because Jazz is so blandly uninformative and this book about murder and conspiracy in the underbelly of the Big Easy desperately needs something to set it apart?

Fulmer provides this explanation midway through the book:

They called what he played jass, short for the French jaser, and claimed it was the Devil's music to be sure, a gumbo of raucous noise that was so loud and fast that the proper reading musicians and their polite white audiences didn't know what to make of it, except to throw up their hands in horror and call for someone to stamp it out before it spread.

If only Jass the book possessed even a pinch of that raucous gumbo. Instead, Fulmer has given us a hefty dish full of sausage and thick broth and not enough spice. The author is never one to let a story get in the way of historical research. The heavy-laden paragraphs progress at the slow, stately tempo of a Ken Burns documentary. This is one instance of a detective story where you'll peek at the end not to find out whodunit but to see if the writing ever gets any better. Sorry to disappoint, but the funereal pace of the story continues through the climax (which, as all mystery lovers know, should at least contain an exciting denouement if not a surprising unmasking of the culprit--neither of which are on hand here).

Jass methodically plods along as Creole detective Valentin St. Cyr (introduced in Fulmer's previous mystery, Chasing the Devil's Tail) tracks down a serial killer who's roaming the streets of the city's red-light district, Storyville. The murders seem to be connected to this new wild, loose music.

Lately, jass was stirring up half-a-dozen establishments, edging ever closer to Basin Street. These rough Joshuas blew their horns and the walls were tumbling down.

St. Cyr, persuaded by his friend Jelly Roll Morton ("the best-known piano man in the District" and one of several real-life jazz players in the novel), becomes convinced that someone is killing these "rough Joshuas" one by one--poisoning them, slitting their throats, leaving them to die in dark alleys and lonely tenements. St. Cyr follows the clues with the dogged determination of a man on a mission. Apart from the "inner demons" of the average tormented detective, St. Cyr's motives are never fully explained, though Fulmer assures us that there's no doubt of his Sherlockian skills:

Valentin St. Cyr's successes as a detective had come less from his powers of deduction than from his ability to see behind masks and divine what drove people this way or that. It seemed he had a sixth sense that allowed him to untangle the sordid webs that miscreants wove.

This is just one example of Fulmer's limp sentences that stretch across the page, bland as over-cooked noodles. With little variety in structure and a numbing cadence that keeps the same steady beat, the paragraphs in Jass all run together in one homogenous goop. The same goes for the characters: the jaded half-breed detective, the whore with the heart of gold, the corrupt police lieutenant--Fulmer must have got a special deal from Stock Characters, Inc.

Along with those characters come the kind of cliches normally not heard outside of Grade-Z movies. One character actually tells St. Cyr, without a trace of irony, "You realize that I can still crush you like an insect. I can have you beaten to within an inch of your life."

To be fair, Jass begins promisingly enough--a character is killed in brutal, startling fashion, much like a typical prologue to a CSI episode. Fulmer then opens the story with some exquisitely detailed descriptions of Storyville as we follow St. Cyr around the saloons, bordellos and boardinghouses. However, it's not long before those exquisite details become an excruciating chore for the reader. Heavy on historical research but light on suspense, Jass is turgid and flat-footed when it should be skipping nimbly through the shadows of noir. ( )