Jed Horne is the author of "Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City," published by Random House. Born and educated in Massachusetts, Horne began with the Boston Phoenix, and worked in New York in the 1970's and 1980's as a writer and editor, primarily with Time Inc. publications.
He moved to New Orleans in the late 1980's with his wife and two sons. Except for the early 1990's when he was posted to Latin America as a foreign correspondent for the Times-Picayune, he worked for the paper as city editor, and more recently, metro editor.
Jed Horne forces you to look into the dark heart of justice in America and defies you to look away. Desire Street is a tour de force of the storyteller’s art–a profoundly insightful book deserving of the highest praise.
Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans’ daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize—winning Times-Picayune, Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city’s collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.
As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation.
In a searing anatomy of a New Orleans murder trial and a system of justice gone wrong, Horne investigates the 1984 murder of a white housewife and the black man who spent 14 years on death row, convicted of a crime that may have been an intricately plotted act of revenge.