Sepetys has an amazing sense of pace she adds just the right amount of historical detail to her fast-paced, suspenseful plot. My senses were awakened with every page I turned. I made my way up Toulouse toward Royal and heard Blind Otis singing the blues, stamping his foot and sliding a dull butter knife across his steel strings.' If the Quarter smelled this bad in cool weather, it would reek this spring and be simply rancid by summer. Forster to wave the smell of moldy oak away from my face as I stepped quickly across the wet flagstones. Here is a bit from an early chapter, when Jo walks from the brothel to the bookstore: Sepetys makes 1950s New Orleans come alive. It twists and turns and has too many mystery elements within it that I don't want to spoil. I won't delve much deeper into the plot of Out of the Easy here. Intertwined with this search is Jo's equally obsessive desire to escape New Orleans so she can attend college. Jo becomes obsessed with a kind stranger who is murdered in the French Quarter and as she searches for information about him she learns more than she ever wanted to know. Jo lives in a one-room attic studio above a bookstore where she also works. The seventeen-year old protagonist, Josie Moraine, cleans up after raucous nights at a brothel on New Orleans' Conti Street, where her mother turns tricks. Sepetys' love and respect for history shines throughout Out of the Easy. As Sepetys says in the interview, 'My fascination with New Orleans was born.' Sepetys even learned that the jeweler who sold the glasses ended up poisoned to death after eating a dozen oysters in the Quarter. Willie, it turns out, was a brothel owner from the French Quarter in New Orleans. Sepetys is madly in love with history (her brilliant debut novel, Between Shades of Gray, is a very intimate look at a 15-year-old Lithuanian girl's experiences in one of Stalin's labor camps) and so she hired a researcher to try to find more information about the glasses. Still in its original case, the glasses were bought from a New Orleans jeweler, and engraved with the words from her friend Willie Robert. She received a pair of vintage opera glasses as a birthday present.

In an interview about her new book, Out of the Easy, Ruta Sepetys describes an object that sent her on a wild and wonderful chase.

A cast of colorful characters and evocative details from 1950s New Orleans form the heart of this fast-paced murder mystery set in the city's French Quarter.

Out of the Easy by Ruta Sepetys