Greg Herren

Greg Herren has kept two New Orleans detective series going at once, the Chanse MacLeod private eye novels and the lighter Scotty Bradley adventures, alongside work in the city as an HIV/AIDS counsellor and educator. Born in Alabama in 1961, he co-founded the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival and edits anthologies as well: Love, Bourbon Street: Reflections of New Orleans, assembled with Paul J. Willis, was named the Lambda winner for anthologies in 2007, and a Chanse novel set on Rue Chartres won the gay mystery category the following year. The fifth Chanse book, which unfolds in the Garden District, reached that same shortlist in 2010 without winning. Baton Rouge Bingo sets Scotty and his partners Colin and Frank to investigate the death of Veronica Porterie, an animal rights campaigner who had been his mother's friend at college. Lake Thirteen, which Bold Strokes Books published in 2013, leaves crime for a ghost story: three families take their annual holiday at a resort in upstate New York, and the bored teenagers disturb a cemetery that has kept its secrets for close to a century.