Hailed by reviewers as "an electrifying debut" (<em>Baltimore Sun</em>) and "perhaps the best evocation of New Orleans ever to appear in print" (<em>Richmond Times-Dispatch</em>), <em>Yellow Jack</em> has given Southern literature its own intoxicating hybrid of Caleb Carr, Flannery O'Connor, and Vladimir Nabokov. Russell's "virtuoso storytelling, evocative prose and original conception mark [his first book] as a significant work that we can only hope will be followed by many more" (<em>Chicago Tribune</em>). <em>Yellow Jack</em> is a ribald, picaresque trip through an 1840s New Orleans saturated with sex, drugs, death, and corruption. In this "luminously haunting" (<em>Entertainment Weekly</em>) portrait of decadence, daguerrotypist Claude Marchand becomes hopelessly entangled with both a voodoo-adept octoroon mistress and the erotically precocious daughter of a prominent New Orleans family. "Russell has distilled the New Orleans of the mid-1800s, the terrible fever of the title, and the savage lives of the characters into a novel of terrible beauty."-<em>Nashville Scene</em>