Ben Neihart's first novel has a lot going for it. There's his protagonist Joe Keith, a suburban kid with the "rosy aspect, and the swagger, and the skinny arms, and the bad reputation" of a classic 16-year-old. There's the New Orleans setting, which many a lesser writer has beaten to death, but which Neihart's jazzy, helium-light prose renders as if it's never been described before. And there are the nifty complications of the plot, a two-tiered job that unfolds in the course of a little more than ten hours. The primary action involves a night on the town for Joe, who's seeking the man of his dreams in the French Quarter. The subplot centers around a child-abuse trial and introduces a nasty cast of characters who seem like Southern cousins of Elmore Leonard's psychopaths. The two narratives converge neatly and inject at least a modicum of suspense into the story. Still, the real attraction is Joe, and his lyrical, late-adolescent take on life in the Big Easy. Neihart conveys the exaggerated, almost operatic, feelings of discovering for the first time those emotions that once seemed reserved exclusively for adults: "Joe felt a blackness approaching his peripheral vision, like a premonition that he was about to lose consciousness: he thought for a moment that maybe his desire for the boys in the Jeep had gushed out of his brain and heart, bounced off the window, and come back on him with a vengeance." That, and the fact that Joe wears his gayness so lightly, make for a breezy and individual debut.

-- James Marcus