The Coffee Shop Chronicles of New Orleans - Part 2: The Last Beaucoeur

"Here is a guy who can paint accurately while he suffers--a talented bohemian, in other words. A worthy addition to your growing New Orleans shelf."--Andrei Codrescu
The Coffee Shop Chronicles of New Orleans - Part 2:  The Last Beaucoeur

The second part of The Coffee Shop Chronicles of New Orleans picks up almost exactly where Part 1 left off. It is the morning of Friday, August 26, 2005, and B. Sammy Singleton is still reeling from the night before. Something is very wrong. Sammy's best friend, Catfish Beaucoeur, is missing, having left behind clues including a book of lynching photography and a disturbing handwritten poem.

More intent than ever on tracking down Catfish, and all thoughts of his coffee shop guidebook writing gig abandoned, Sammy takes off on a whirlwind quest through the streets of New Orleans that carries him to the office of Infinity Feingold, Catfish's formidable attorney; to the St. Charles mansion Catfish grew up in, where his mother, Tess, still resides; and, ultimately, to the Magazine Street antiques shop of Lee Ann Rush. Lee Ann is more concerned with the monster hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast than with Catfish's whereabouts, but she soon transports Sammy (and us) back to the 1960s and '70s, the school years during which she and Catfish were best friends.

Peopled with some of the same colorful characters who inhabited the first part of the book, including Sammy's housemate Naomi Plant and his landlord Georgia Moore, Part 2: The Last Beaucoeur explores the territory of the human heart as it weaves together a story of love, the saga of a slave-holding family and its place in New Orleans' civil rights history, and a meditation on the meaning of life and how our past inevitably shapes the here and now.