Hi there! I so hope you enjoyed SWORN, and if you are new to my books, welcome to the family!

In the back of all my books, I always love to include a Dear Fabulous Reader section that talks about what locations from the book can be visited in real life or what sparked my inspiration for a particular plot point.

We’ll break it down bullet-point style :)

• The Sultan’s Palace where Avery and Katie live is…real! But, much like in SWORN, the story is very much spun of tall tales and rumors. As the legend goes, a man arrived at the port of New Orleans around the 1860s and immediately rented out the property at Dauphine and Orleans from a well-to-do gentleman. Some months later, a ship arrived in the port and it took a full week for everyone to disembark and make the four-block trek to the house from the docks. Arriving from somewhere in the Middle East, it was a sultan, his harem, and his bodyguards. Once they entered the house, no one was ever seen coming or going until one night, some many months later, when a storm ravaged the city. The next morning, a little boy was running down the street when he caught sight of a trickle of blood leading down the front steps. He rushed to the police precinct, and they all hurried over. Opening the door, what they found turned their stomachs. There was the metallic scent of blood in the air and there were bodies strewn this way and that, all decapitated. They went to the courtyard in search of the sultan, and while the soil was still soggy from the night before, they found him there, his one hand reaching out from the ground, where he’d been buried alive. Who did it? Well, they say it was the first man who’d arrived in the city, perhaps the sultan’s brother who’d orchestrated the whole thing, and who was jealous of all the riches his brother had….PHEW. That was dramatic, am I right? And all untrue, but it makes for a great story and I couldn’t resist using it as the backdrop for Avery’s apartment. It is actually an apartment building today, and thanks to some lovely condo owners who let me in while I was a tour guide, I can say that it’s quite beautiful! But, yep, definitely not the stage of a horrific scene as the stories go! If you are keen to learn more, a quick search of “Sultan’s Palace New Orleans” will bring it right up for you!
• Mr. Luis and I like to joke around that between the two of us, we have all the shadowy parts of New Orleans covered. Him as a police officer for the city, and me, as a former tour guide for a ghost tour company. When beginning SWORN, I became (rather) obsessed with the idea of a book that played in on inner-city politics, quietly hushed events involving our finest men in blue, and the local lore that is so intrinsically New Orleans that it can’t be separated without causing a loss to the city’s culture. New Orleans has been my home for over a decade, and it carries a torch of vitality that anyone who has ever lived here will just say, “Yep, that’s New Orleans for you.” We are a city of people that loves our history, and here are a few ways I pulled that all in to SWORN:
• Tarot readers in Jackson Square—aside from my mother reading Tarot and so having a special place in my heart, I truly wanted to bring this somewhat “otherworldly” feel into SWORN. The readers in Jackson Square are staples of the French Quarter, but they’ve had their rough patches with city ordinances cracking down on them, enforcing permits and times in which they can operate. Moreover, I wanted to show that Tarot isn’t an “evil” thing, and like Avery showed us—it’s all in the way the cards are read. Poor Lincoln! ;)
• The Atchafalaya Basin, also known as “Whiskey Bay”—the Basin has long since been a spot for, unfortunately, crime. Check online and you’ll find article after article about bodies popping up. But what really interested me was the case of Baton Rouge’s serial killer [name redacted here but can be found online] dating to the early 2000’s. In fact, there were two serial killers operating at the same time in the same areas, though they had no known links to each other. Many of the victims were found in their homes, but a few were discovered at the base of the bridge of the Basin. When it came to Ambideaux, it felt important that he teeter the line of respectability—and, more specifically, that everything he did was calculated and methodical. A drive out to Whiskey Bay, and therefore seeming “innocent” of any of the people disappearing from New Orleans, fit his profile. Even so, I had to include the term “Whiskey Bay” somehow, and I hope Nat would approve.
• Sex and New Orleans go hand-in-hand. Home to Gallatin Street, a nineteenth-century strip of seven or so blocks that would make anyone quiver in their boots, it was once said that if you could make it on Gallatin, you could make it anywhere in the world. Fast-forward some forty years, and you’d find yourself smack-dub in the middle of the Storyville era, which was a quarantined section within the French Quarter that allowed all brothels to operate without penalty. Naturally, if you operated outside of that area in the Quarter, you’d be shut down immediately. Storyville produced Louis Armstrong—okay, well, he was born there and got his start there—and was the first legalized red light district in the country with some of the madams (i.e. Josie Arlington) making so much money that they mingled with politicians on the regular, owned some of the finest homes in the city, and were take-charge businesswomen, despite the unfortunate business they operated in. The Basement is my little nod to that era in time, which has always fascinated me. And I have to imagine that if Nat had lived at the turn of the century, she would have given any of those ladies a run for their money. Literally!

Although there are many others, I may have rambled long enough! LOL! If you’re thinking to yourself, “Did this happen in real life, Maria?” Always feel free to reach out. I’m happy to talk New Orleans, and generally speaking, scandalous activities are my favorite discussion topics when it comes to history :)

Xoxo,

Maria