Carmela Bertrand is creating custom place cards for a friend's pre-wedding party at an elegant French Quarter restaurant when she makes a shocking discovery--the intended groom has a butcher knife protruding from his neck!  When the heartbroken bride asks Carmela to look into the case, Carmela finds herself not just in the soup--she's in the gumbo!  Besides battling her estranged husband, Shamus, Carmela has to deal with an alligator-infested bayou, an angry rare book collector, shadowy figures, and a spooky encounter in one of New Orleans' cemeteries!

A brutal murder and a mysterious kidnapping propel Carmela into a frantic search through the bayous of western Louisiana and pull her into a high society mystery even as the city of New Orleans struggles to rebuild. 

With Halloween barely a week away, things are spookier than ever in New Orleans.  A party at Juju Voodoo draws a fabulous throng, and Carmela's friend Ava has hired a sexy tarot card reader named Giovanni to work the crowd.  What he doesn't foretell is that on her way home, Carmela will discover the body of a beautiful model behind a Dumpster--and be attacked herself! 

Amid zydeco rhythms and popping champagne corks, scrapbook shop owner Carmela Bertrand and her friend Ava are partying in the French Quarter.  It's Mardi Gras, and they never imagined this might be the scene of a murder, but as the evening progresses, float designer Archie Baudier is found dead on the balcony--strangled with a barbed wire garrote.  The only thing wilder than this crime are the theories about who did it--from a ritualistic slaying to a mob hit to the outlandish work of a rival Mardi Gras float builder.  As Carmela flirts with handsome detective Edgar Babcock, she also ponders the odd clues; gold paint on the victim's shoes, a ransacked apartment, and a glimmering gold doubloon.

Design-wise Carmela Bertrand of Memory Mine scrapbook store is tapped to create spooky set decorations for Medusa Manor, a new haunted house attraction in New Orleans.  But a flaming body hurled from the third-floor tower might just put a damper on the project.

Scrapbook maven Carmela Bertrand and her friend Ava create giant puppets for the French Quarter’s Monsters and Mayhem parade. But as blood-curdling screams pierce the night, they discover that the captain of the float den has been stabbed by the razor-sharp horns of a giant Minotaur head!

The last thing scrapbooking maven Carmela Bertrand expected to bear witness to in St. Tristan’s Church was a crime. But now a beloved member of her scrapbooking circle is dead – and a mysterious hooded figure has absconded with an antique crucifix. With the church, a popular New Orleans tourist site, pretty much open to the public, it looks like the police don’t have a prayer of finding the killer. Good thing amateur sleuth Carmela and her voodoo shop-owning friend, Ava, are hot on the trail of suspects that range from the strange Brother Paul to the cult group The Seekers. Combing New Orleans for clues, they end up in a bayou at midnight--stalked by an enraged killer!