Severed, A Novel

Description

Dismembered fingers. Lives cut short. A local investigation will upset the tranquility of a small Louisiana town. Dr. Lula Logan (fictitious character) has been asked by her former boyfriend, a detective with whom she had just broken up, to investigate the appearance of severed fingers left at police department headquarters. Then another dismembered finger surfaces at the home of a local producer/writer and his business partner. The writer has been AWOL, and no one knows where he is. As the investigation of the mysterious fingers deepens, we will learn that many people affiliated with the missing writer’s production company, including his wife, have a stake in his disappearance. Notes, emails, and flower deliveries with written threats arrive, received by different individuals who want their involvement in the intrigue to remain undetected.

Set in a contemporary rural pocket of Northwestern Louisiana, [fictional] Nakadee is a university town with a population under 15,000. The citizens of Nakadee, whose ancestors have lived there for several hundred years, while trapped in its relative remoteness, are thankful for its quiet refuge. They purposefully wish to live life in the slow lane. The town is a mix of Creole, Cajun, Black and European inhabitants. Luscious in its comparison to swampy, crowded New Orleans and its northern neighbor, a complacently citified Shreveport, Nakadee is a sleepy hollow (near Cane River country), and is likely to grow in leaps and bounds given an anticipated natural gas pipeline construction project which will change its moribund economy.

The polemic of South versus North weighs on the hearts and minds of Americans, even in contemporary society. Events of the Civil War feel like only yesterday for some southerners. Slavery and its consequences (Nat Turner, Emancipation, Jim Crow, etc.) and how America treats its freed-slave population to this day factors into America’s zeitgeist. Everyone is searching for someone with whom to relate on a platonic level and the search for friendship is very elusive throughout America. People in Nakadee must navigate across the socioeconomic and sociocultural divide in search of a true friend.