Found this on 64 parishes site.

Julie Smith
Julie Smith’s novels, featuring female detectives Skip Langdon and later Talba Wallis, are also inextricably rooted in New Orleans culture and atmosphere. Smith, a former reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, reflects her emphasis on place in the titles of her works, beginning with the Edgar-winning New Orleans Mourning and continuing through The Axeman’s Jazz, Crescent City Kill, Jazz Funeral, and House of Blues, to list only a few examples. Smith differs from Burke in that, while her works certainly include the seamier side of New Orleans, her protagonist, Skip Langdon, comes from the New Orleans upper class and we see the city from that perspective. Educated at private schools, raised amid the rich and elaborate pageantry of Carnival krewes and the gentility of the Garden District, Langdon rebels against that world to become a police officer. Yet its influence persists through much of the series. Instead of presenting a city defined primarily by criminality, as is often the case in hard-boiled detective fiction, Smith evokes the complexity and eclecticism at the city’s heart. Her New Orleans is as much about book clubs and teas as back alleys and drug deals. Smith’s second female sleuth, Talba Wallis (the name is derived from Baroness Pontalba), was introduced in the Skip Langdon novel 82 Desire and now has her own series. An African American woman who works as a private investigator by day and a poet and performance artist by night, Talba balances her various professional endeavors, as well as the pressures and expectations of her mother, Miz Clara. Julie Smith has written twenty mystery novels, and in 2007 edited New Orleans Noir, a collection of New Orleans-based crime fiction by a variety of established and emerging writers.