Death Before Facebook (Skip Langdon #4) (Skip Langdon Mystery)

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Death Before Facebook (Skip Langdon #4) (Skip Langdon Mystery) (The Skip Langdon Series)

Death Before Facebook, formerly entitled New Orleans Beat, is the FOURTH book in the Edgar Award-winning Skip Langdon series by Julie Smith.

"Smith not only gives us the lowdown on the Big Easy but also take us into the often weird world of computer bulletin boards ... Reader-friendly from log-on to log-off." -The Orlando Sentinel

MURDER MOST VIRAL!

Itâ€™s a chilly November in 1994, and thirty-one-year-old Geoff Kavanagh surreptitiously splits his time between science fiction novels and cyberspace in his parentsâ€™ dilapidated, overgrown, uptown New Orleans mansion. Until his mother finds him dead from a suspicious fall off a ladder. Maybe he should never have posted about seeing his father murdered â€¦ because way too many people on the TOWN, a pre-Facebook virtual community, knew things about his family he didnâ€™t even suspect. Decades-old skeletons start falling out of closets after Geoffâ€™s untimely death, thanks to New Orleans Detective Skip Langdon. Langdon finds Geoffâ€™s gorgeous mom strangely uninterested in her sonâ€™s fatal fall, but Momâ€™s apparently the only one. It seems the post has gone viral. Suddenly all the TOWNSpeople have theoriesâ€”and ambition as cyberdetectives. Whatâ€™s a murderer to do but kill his way out?

Calling the windup â€œa virtuoso spin on Rashomon,â€ Kirkus noted that, along the way, â€œSmith worms her way deeply and painfully into her cast's layers and layers of past relations, getting deeper than ever into Skip as well.â€

Written in the mid-90s, Death Before Facebook is a suspenseful online murder mystery blast from the past: THE NET meets Prime Suspect.

"If you haven't discovered Smith yet, now is the time to do so . . . Move over, Sara Paretsky." â€”KPFA-FM (Berkeley, CA)

â€œA poisonous bouquet from a still-rising star.â€ -Kirkus

"A peek into the sometimes dangerous world of the computer-obsessed, set in the sultry heat of New Orleans and tempered with just the right dose of Southern humor." â€”USA Today

Excerpt:
â€œWhen Geoff was four years old, he and his mother came home one night to find his father dead on the bedroom floor. Shot with his own revolverâ€”he was a cop.â€

â€œA cop!â€

â€œIn your very own department. Geoff thought he could remember coming homeâ€”climbing the stairs with his mother, going into the bedroom, and finding the body. But once heâ€™d asked her, and she said it wasnâ€™t like that at all. She said Geoff ran right up the stairs and went to the bathroom; meanwhile Margueriteâ€”thatâ€™s his motherâ€”went into the bedroom and turned on the light. It was all she could do to keep from screaming, but she didnâ€™t want little Geoffrey to know what was going on, so she turned out the light, closed the door, and went downstairs to call the cops.â€

â€œPretty damn cool.â€

â€œWell, who knows what really happened? Thatâ€™s just what she told Geoff. Anyway, it got him to thinking his own memory was bogusâ€”or might be. And after he had that dream, he kept getting these weird flashbacks, if you want to call them that, like incest survivors are supposed to haveâ€”little half-memories. Like being in bed and hearing an argument. Running down the hall. His motherâ€™s face. His dad on the floorâ€¦ actually, he had that one all the time, from before his mother told him heâ€™d never seen that. Do you see what Iâ€™m getting at?â€

â€œHe posted this stuff?â€™

â€œYes.â€

â€œUnder his own name?â€

â€œYou canâ€™t hide your identity on the TOWNâ€”you have a user ID, but anyone can check you out in about two seconds. Geoff was Vidkid.â€

â€œSo if it was true, if he really had witnessed the murder, or had even been in the house when one was committed, he was putting it out there for the world to know. Is that what youâ€™re saying?â€

â€œThat was our reasoning, yes. When we found out about the â€˜accidentâ€™.â€

Skip could see why this was the talk of the TOWN.

Country	USA
Author	Julie Smith
Binding	Kindle Edition
Format	Kindle eBook
IsAdultProduct
Label	booksBnimble
Manufacturer	booksBnimble
NumberOfPages	368
PublicationDate	2013-12-30
Publisher	booksBnimble
ReleaseDate	2013-12-30
Studio	booksBnimble

Death Before Facebook (Skip Langdon #4) (Skip Langdon Mystery) (The Skip Langdon Series)

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