“Catnip Jazz”

Catnip Jazz is a novel by local author, Marilinne Cooper

A Cajun fortuneteller. A sassy sex show performer. A pair of Voodoo Buddhists in the Bywater…When Myles rescues Kit, a mysterious woman wandering in the desert landscape of the Baja Peninsula, he has no idea how his good deed will irrevocably change the future. He soon finds himself on the run with murder charges hanging over his head. Fleeing north with Kit, under an assumed identity, he leaves an idyllic beach existence on the Sea of Cortez for a new life as a musician in colorful New Orleans. But eventually the past catches up with Myles in a series of cataclysmic events from which there is no turning back. Meanwhile, in a Vermont village, Tyler Mackenzie’s domain has been forever changed by the presence of Chloe, the whirlwind young mother of his twin granddaughters. Chloe has taken over his household and his job, leaving Tyler in a semi-permanent state of depression, a couch potato unable to locate his irresponsible son, Tucker, or his wayward best friend, Myles. But the winter doldrums end abruptly when first Diva, Myles’s cat, and then Angel, the charismatic tourist, arrive. Soon Chloe is derailed by dark desires for drugs and sex and is plunged into a hypnotic nightmare of deception, and Tyler finds himself once again searching for the lost adult children of West Jordan. With an improbable cast of spicy personalities, Catnip Jazz works its way from Mexico to New Orleans and to the seediest sections of Montreal, weaving compelling narratives together in a dark and twisty adventure that keeps the pages turning and burning.