NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- In the summer of 2005, after years of living in New York City and working as a public relations pro for some of Wall Street's biggest and best known hedge funds, Ed Rowley gave in to homesickness and moved his family back to his native New Orleans.

But only six weeks after he got there, Hurricane Katrina hit, destroying Rowley's home and almost everything in it.

Ed Rowley, novelist

Since then, the career of this investment banker-turned bartender-turned hedge fund spokesman has taken yet another turn: novelist.

When his wife got her old job back as a commercial banker, he decided to stay home with his two children and focus on promoting his New Orleans-themed novel that he was in the process of self-publishing when the storm hit.

The novel, written under the pen name Edgar Nicaud, is a comedic take on New Orleans called "Tremble + Ennui."

The career change has so far worked out well: His PR savvy helped him get positive notices in "Publisher's Weekly" and a handful of national newspapers including the "Los Angeles Times" and the "Boston Herald."

As he was making progress on book promotion, Rowley's personal life was in a state of chaos. His home was off limits until October, and when he and his wife and children finally did return from staying with relatives in Baton Rouge, the house uninhabitable.

"There was garbage all over the place and military vehicles everywhere," Rowley said. "It was so unreal to think this was your house - books were unrecognizable, furniture fell apart in your hands, there was mold everywhere."

The mood of the city bore such a sharp contrast to the tone of Rowley's soon-to-be-published novel - a slight, amusing tale of two hard-drinking ne'er-do-wells - that Rowley thought hard about whether it was appropriate to publish such an openly silly portrayal of New Orleans at such a bleak time.

Title character Tremble makes ends meet by cashing the welfare checks of her apartment's previous tenant, who never bothered having her mail forwarded.

Ennui, who has no discernible skills beyond making an excellent martini (and knocking them back with equal aplomb), lives off the largesse of Tremble, who keeps Ennui around because of his mixing skills.

Throughout the novel, the pair get into scrapes involving assorted shady characters, such as a famous chef (who, it turns out, can't cook to save his life) and a lawyer who comes back from the dead so he can sue the ambulance driver who ran over him.

Rowley acknowledged that his chaotic depiction of New Orleans - crime ridden, sweltering, overrun with scammers and halfwits - suddenly didn't seem so amusing in light of the looting, violence and desperate poverty that Katrina left in its wake.

"It was such a comedic take on the city -- and immediately after the hurricane it was hard to find anything funny," said Rowley of the book. "This was an absurd book that I was going to put out on a whim, and (I wondered if) it even made sense for me to focus on something like this."

But in the end, Rowley opted to forge ahead, in part because the book reflected the city pre-Katrina, a New Orleans that will in all likelihood never be the same.

Indeed, while Rowley's novel mocks New Orleans, it does so with undeniable affection for the city, leading "Publishers Weekly" to call it "an uproarious, quicksilver love song to New Orleans."

As for his current gig, Rowley said he's actively looking to resume a professional career. Rowley said he may even consider working with hedge funds again, an experience he enjoyed.

But regardless of what career choice he makes, Rowley has decidedly mixed feelings about staying in his home town.

"It's incredibly stressful to live here," he said. "A lot of it is just the visual impact of just driving past destroyed houses and neighborhoods that just look like a war zone - absolute abandoned desolation. And you drive through these areas in the normal course of running errands... For now, we're here, but it will be years before things get to normal, if they ever do."

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