Carnival

New Orleans is in the grip of Carnival, where masks hide more than faces and the streets thrum with chaos. For retired DEA agent Robert King, business is booming—and so is the danger. His private investigations have a darker, unspoken purpose: helping his niece, Louie Thorne, use her supernatural ability to hunt monsters without losing what remains of her humanity.

But Lou doesn’t believe in restraint. King does.

When Lou identifies a serial killer stalking women under the cover of the festivities, King makes a desperate choice. If they kill him too soon, justice will never come—and the families he’s already destroyed will never have answers. Lou must take the man alive…even as the clock ticks down on his next victim.

As the hunt escalates, the danger turns personal. Melandra Durand—owner of an occult shop in the French Quarter and King’s closest ally—finds her carefully built life unraveling when her abusive husband is released from prison. The past she escaped is no longer content to stay buried.

With multiple women in mortal danger and the city itself feeding the madness, Lou is forced to confront an impossible question:

How do you stop a monster without becoming one—and what does it cost to try?

Carnival is a dark, atmospheric vigilante thriller set against the fever dream of New Orleans, where justice, obsession, and survival collide—and no one gets out untouched.

This is book 4 of the Shadows in the Water series.