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Okay, I like the pun in the title, and I love the setting. I have been lucky enough to have to go to NOLA on business twice in the last year, and I had wonderful times there (as I always inevitably do). so I was excited to revisit the French Quarter in particular in this novel, and was pleased to get an insider’s insights into the class system there and the rules and traditions of Mardi Gras.

However, I just couldn’t come to care for the main character, Skip Langdon. She is presented to us as the gangly upper class girl who never fit in, so she rejected the world of debutantes and (ostensibly) is now proving herself as a rookie cop, an Amazon policewoman with guts and determination, also confronted with reverse snobbery from her sexist working class cop colleagues. The story itself is from some years ago, but that part didn’t bother me—I just found her behavior inconsistent (you can’t be both the gangling wallflower and Charlie’s primo Angel at the same time). I also didn’t get why her love interest, the tall sexy moviemaking hunk from the West Coast, found her so captivating—that whole love dynamic didn’t make sense and the more their possible romance was hemmed and hawed over, the less interested I became. (I almost stopped reading altogether when he seduced her into their naked purification ritual with candles and incense.) There were many less nauseating parts of the book, some I even enjoyed. For instance, I did enjoy the chapters given over to narration by different characters from this rich but dysfunctional Southern family steeped in melancholia (thank you for the idea, Mr. Faulkner�) as we tried to figure out which one committed the murder of King Rex at the high point of Mardi Gras, disguised as a sharpshooting Dolly Parton.