Death Before Facebook

I’ll skip the rug for now,
she thought
. I could go to California instead.
    THE END

Acknowledgments
     
    What would I have done without the WELL? Many thanks to David Gans (tnf), Scott Marley (hudu), and Thaisa Frank (thaisa), for advice and support; to Jon Carroll (jrc), for that and more; and to Jim Petersen, the real (bigeasy), for the loan of his user ID.
     
    Greg Peterson, Richard Sabatté, Betsy Petersen, Steve Holtz, Chris Wiltz, Nancy Moss, Kit Wohl, Becky Light, and Diane Rubin were generous with their expertise. Chris Smither contributed advice on love.
     
    Captain Linda Buczek of the New Orleans Police Department, with her delicate understanding of a writer’s needs, nuts-and-bolts knowledge of police procedure, and generosity of spirit, was immensely helpful (not to mention patient and kind), as always.
     
    My deepest thanks to all who assisted.

Author’s Note (continued)
     
    In 1994, when Mark Zuckerberg was ten and this book was first published, you were cutting edge if you had high hopes for “virtual communities” and regularly posted on a BBS, or bulletin board service.
    A BBS had a lot in common with Facebook. You could be great friends with people you’d never met, and you had the ability to communicate with a lot of people at once. But you didn’t choose your “friends,” you just joined up and posted on whatever topic entered your head. It was a little like a listserv, or even one of today’s specialized online communities, like GoodReads.
    While the technology in the former NEW ORLEANS BEAT predates Facebook, the central idea—that if you post indiscreetly, something bad could come of it—remains as true today as it was all those years ago.
    In converting the former NEW ORLEANS BEAT to an electronic edition, I was faced with decisions—to update? To revise? To do both? I made what may seem like a counter-intuitive choice—to revise but not to update. If I updated one thing, I’d have to update another. Suddenly everyone would have cell phones and the whole plot would be different.
    And one other thing—it just wouldn’t be right. If you happen to read OLIVER TWIST today, do you expect everyone to drive cars? Of course not. A book should be true to its time—it is an artifact of that time, a record; even, in a sense, a bit of history, one of the few ways we have of keeping track of how things actually were then.
    So I let it be. But I revised for the same reason I changed the title—because I could. No author is ever pleased with the finished project, but in the end we just have to let go. Now, with the advent of ebooks, we get another chance. In proofing the scanned document, I saw subplots and scenes I thought bogged the book down, so why not lose them? It’s a sleeker book now, a faster read, and maybe it’s better.

The next Skip Langdon mystery is HOUSE OF BLUES; find out more at www.booksbnimble.com or www.juliesmithbooks.com
     
    “A genuinely moving mystery…It’s always a pleasure to spend time with Skip, a no-nonsense, level-headed heroine in a wild and reckless city.”
—THE BALTIMORE SUN
     
    HOUSE OF BLUES
     
    by Julie Smith
     
    A sneak preview of the next Skip Langdon mystery
     
    “MRS. HEBERT? I’M Skip Langdon.”
    Skip had arrived with her platoon, all in the same car, because there weren’t nearly enough unmarked cars to go around. They must have looked terrifying, a six-foot woman and three men in suits, advancing like a phalanx.
    The woman on the porch, looked blank. “Yes?” she said, as if unable to comprehend why strangers were invading her house. If she were Sugar Hebert, she’d just arrived home to find her husband shot dead in the dining room.
    “Detective Skip Langdon. I’m from Homicide.”
    “Oh, I see.”
    Skip was talking because she was the one who’d caught the case, meaning she’d been next on the list when the call came. She gestured for the others to go in—she’d interview the witness, they could divide up the other chores.
    Rather than sad, the woman seemed bewildered and scared out of her mind, though she’d had a little time to calm down. The district officer had arrived first and had called Homicide. Hebert said, “They’re gone. All of them. I only left for twenty minutes.”
    “Shall we talk in the car?” Hebert looked as if she could stand to sit down.
    “Yes. Please. They said I couldn’t stay in the house.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Well, not that I’d want to.” They were side by side now, and