Chris Tusa’s Dirty Little Angels , the writer’s first novel, is a gritty, visceral, and sometimes heartbreaking, exploration of the underbelly of New Orleans through the eyes of its sixteen year-old narrator, Hailey Trosclair. This is a book with a seam of hopelessness running through its 147 pages. Whether it’s the broken-down streets and buildings of New Orleans, or the brutal characterization of the inhabitants of the area, there’s a pervading sense of impending disaster in this novel. Hailey Trosclair is a character of some complication—a willful ingenue intent on using her charms to capture the attention of her best friend Meridian’s boyfriend, Chase. A witness to her brother’s brutal beating of a young boy suspected of being a pedophile; and a visitor of the cancer ward of the local hospital where the husband of her father’s lover, Iris, lies dying of stomach cancer, Hailey circumnavigates a territory of such weight she is destined to sink beneath that world and...