CIA assassin Fortune Redding is about to undertake her most difficult mission ever – in Sinful, Louisiana. With a leak at the CIA and a price placed on her head by one of the world’s largest arms dealers, Fortune has to go off-grid, but she never expected to be this far out of her element. Posing as a former beauty queen turned librarian in a small bayou town seems worse than death to Fortune, but she’s determined to fly below the radar until her boss finds the leak and puts the arms dealer out of play. 

Unfortunately, she hasn’t even unpacked a suitcase before her newly inherited dog digs up a human bone in her backyard. Thrust into the middle of a bayou murder mystery, Fortune teams up with a couple of seemingly sweet old ladies whose looks completely belie their hold on the little town. To top things off, the handsome local deputy is asking her too many questions. If she’s not careful, this investigation might blow her cover and get her killed. Armed with her considerable skills and a group of elderly ladies the locals dub the Geritol Mafia, Fortune has no choice but to solve the murder before it’s too late.

I’m very, very late coming to this party (there are now twenty-eight Miss Fortune Mysteries in print) but I’m happy to be here. ‘Lousisana Longshot‘ was great fun. The humour was unforced but constant. Even though the main character, Fortune Redding, is a CIA assassin with a long list of kills to her name, she’s easy to like. I enjoyed her, often bemused, reaction to living in the small town of Sinful, Louisiana, which seems more alien to her than being in-country in a Middle Eastern desert. I enjoyed watching her try and fail to behave like the librarian and ex-beauty queen her cover story claims she is. Most of all, I enjoyed watching her getting to know the formidable and amusing older women who lead The Sinful Ladies who covertly run the town.

There’s a mystery plot that’s used mostly to reveal the complex history of Sinful and The Sinful Ladies while putting Fortune into increasingly risky situations that usually end with her getting wet, muddy, shooting something and or trying to hide from the local ex-marine Deputy Sheriff.

For me, the book was one big smile and I happily suspended my disbelief to enjoy it fully. I loved the mix of the young assassin and the dangerous, secretive, scheming old ladies trying to solve a murder while preventing the Deputy Sheriff from building a case against a local widow.

The plot made a kind of whacky sense. Yes, it was too fantastic to be true but it was also too much fun for me to be worried about feasibility.

I think this series is going to be a regular comfort read for me, an opportunity to step away from reality into a chaotic, slightly exotic, female-dominated world where the good guys win the end. I’ve already downloaded ‘Lethal Bayou Beauty‘, the second book in the series.

I recommend the audiobook version of ‘Louisiana Longshot‘. Cassandra Campbell’s narration added a lot to my enjoyment of the book. I think she got the tone absolutely right and she gave each of the main characters a distinctive voice. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

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Jana DeLeon was raised in southwest Louisiana among the bayous and gators. Her hometown is Carlyss, but you probably won’t find it on a map. Her family owned a camp located on a bayou just off the Gulf of Mexico that you could only get to by boat. The most important feature was the rope hammock hanging in the shade on a huge deck that stretched out over the water where Jana spent many hours reading books.

She has published more than fifty novels. Her series include: The Miss Fortune Mysteries (28 books) The Shaye Archer series (7 books), The Ghost-In.Law Mysteries (6 books) and the Happily Everlasting series (7 books).