Madeleine's Ghost

Brooklyn needs a saint. Ned Conti needs a stipend. So the struggling young historian agrees to trace the mysterious past of a Brooklyn nun for evidence of miracles. Trapped in a neighborhood of cheap rents and failed promise in a rent-controlled apartment suddenly inexplicably seized by a beautiful and angry ghost Ned''s only refuge is the F train to Manhattan''s East Village bars where he and his friends drown their sorrows in drink..... But Ned is about to heed another call the siren song of New Orleans where the history of countless lost souls seems to rise from the steaming streetsand where ten years before he ended a brief passionate affair with a woman whose memory has haunted him ever since. Here in a city of spirits Ned will embrace a dead saint and a living sinner...as a beautiful ghost offers him her desire. And his destiny..... Set amid the sleepless energy and seething passion of New York and New Orleans Madeleine''s Ghost is a spellbinding novel of lost love history and desirea work of startling originality that is at once exquisitely written and compulsively readable.