Last of the Red Hot Poppas

Last of the Red Hot Poppas by Jason Berry

inside the mansion

"Last of the Red Hot Poppas will make you laugh and it will make you think rather more deeply than will make you comfortable, and in these wildly disjointed times that means this novel is not only a richly enjoyable read but an essential one."

— Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

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Last of the Red Hot Poppas is part ribald whodunit, part social satire and part "spiritual comedy," as Berry calls it. It's a chaotic romp through the many levels of "Looziana," but above all, it is a novel about the struggle to maintain one's integrity in a mad world of politics and power.

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ISBN: 0-9741995-2-4
Pages: 305
Case: Hardcover
Price: US $24.50
Release Date: September 1, 2006
Special Powers: The cover unfolds into an A2 poster

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Blurbs

.. a rambunctious (and at times uproarious) fictional ride through Louisiana's infamous political circus. Last of the Red Hot Poppas, by accomplished New Orleans journalist/author Jason Berry, is well worth the read.

— Quin Hillyer, The American Spectator, February 7th, 2008

If Sean Penn's Willie Stark in "All the King's Men" leaves you craving a more authentic taste of Bayou bluster, try "Last of the Red Hot Poppas." The hilariously twisted new novel from New Orleans native Jason Berry is a far more knowing take on the tragicomedy that is Louisiana politics.

— Ellis Henican, Newsday, Sept 24, 2006

"Right-wing flag enthusiasts, big oil power brokers, luckless inheritors of environmental degradation, professional gamblers, sexual profligates, ACLU lawyers and political hit men — Last of the Red Hot Poppas has all of these and more. Jason Berry, quintessential Louisiana insider and witty chronicler of what passes for morality in the halls of power, has concocted a tantalizing mix of comic misdemeanors and serious criminal activity."

— Valerie Martin, Orange Prize winner for her novel Property

"Both wildly entertaining and deadly serious, Last of the Red Hot Poppas is a fabulous read — nobody understands Louisiana politics (and its larger-than-life characters) better than Jason Berry. I couldn't put this one down."

— Lee Smith, Author of On Agate Hill and The Last Girls

"With the grittiness of Dashiell Hammett and the rhythms of James Ellroy, Jason Berry gives us Louisiana politics. Last of the Red Hot Poppas is a novel you won’t be able to put down."

— Raymond D. Strother,
Falling Up: How a Redneck Helped Invent Political Consulting

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MURDER AT THE MANSION (Chapter 1)

In the top floor bedroom, the First Lady dreamed of making love with Rex beneath the arms of a muscular oak. Her body, cupped by the earth, moistens in feathery rain, the sky explodes with a quickening rhythm of water on leaves, and then they fall, sinking into hot muck, lost in a magic and sinful state at the bottom of America.

At fifty-four, the First Lady wore the same size six as her wedding gown. Her dark-haired beauty was a solvent to the advance of time. A stream of sun rays parted her eyelids. She bolted up from the pillow and wrapped herself in her red silk robe, a gift from Exxon’s wife.

Waking Rex was odd duty. She so rarely did it. However long he may have lingered in some assignation hatched after the hustings, he always made it back, smelling clean, for several hours of sleep, his room or hers, wherever prudence deem he camp. She daubed her face with cold water and stepped into the hallway, muttering a Hail Mary for patience.

Each day he wasn’t on the road, Rex was head of the Mansion he loved like a human body. His ratings had risen steadily across the years while she installed art works from distant places, purchased with her own money, the more exotic pieces a secret between them. The marble for the solarium came from quarries south of Florence, a goodwill gesture to the state from some now-interred Mediterranean administration grateful for medical supplies, foodstuff and Italo-Louisiana volunteers, dispatched by Rex on oil company airplanes to a village rubbled by an earthquake west of Pisa. That is when Governor LaSalle had gone on TV. He spoke from the Capitol terrace, overlooking the statue of Huey Long, and held up His Holiness’s letter: “A gift of stone, blessed by the throne in Rome, affirms the values of our state — an international state!â€


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About the Author, Jason Berry

Jason Berry is renowned for his pioneering investigative reporting on sexual abuse in the Catholic priesthood. Lead Us Not Into Temptation (1992) was the first major book on the church's crisis and is still used in many newsrooms. He has worked as a consultant for ABC News and is routinely interviewed in the national media about Catholic church issues and his native city, New Orleans. Vows of Silence (2004) prompted a Vatican investigation and demotion of one of the most powerful priests in Rome. The author is putting the finishing touches on a film documentary based on that book this summer. Mr. Berry is also a cultural chronicler of New Orleans in such books as Up From the Cradle of Jazz, a grand history of popular music. His play, Earl Long in Purgatory, won a 2002 Big Easy Award for best original work of theater.

The author has received Guggenheim and Alicia Patterson fellowships for his research. The comic novel Last of the Red Hot Poppas marks a new turn in this writer's varied career.