This weekend in New Orleans, sixteen-year-old Joe Keith will fall in and out of love half a dozen times: with his frazzled mom; with Al Theim, his neighbor, who's transforming himself from a geek to a stud before Joe's eyes; with Kel, the fiercely fashionable manager of a hang-around record store; with White Donna, funky d.j. and party girl; with Iquoi, French Quarter pizza girl and the best kisser in town; and with Welk, a buff, take-charge orphan.

This is the New Orleans of giddy music and skies, gorgeous decay, perpetual good times. But if any city has a dark side, it is New Orleans, and once Joe makes his way from his safe suburban home to his friends' easygoing hangouts, and finally deeper into the back alleys and hidden doorways of the Quarter, he finds himself at the scene of an unspeakable crime perpetrated by the depraved, vengeful Rae Schipke. Schipke's fury, turned on Joe, propels the book to its exhilarating finish.