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New Orleans Mourning is one of the relatively rare Edgar Best Novel winners that I had already read, shortly after its publication. I've gone on to read all Smith's New Orleans books; for some reason, I didn't get into her earlier San Francisco-based series.

Rereading the first book in a long-running series is a bit like reconnecting with an old friend, but it's also a bit like time travel. In this first book, Skip Langdon, Smith's protagonist, is still feeling her way as a police officer and as an adult woman. She has a lot of unresolved issues and so do most of the other major characters in the book -- and some very similar issues, at that. Mention is made that Skip has been reading Tennessee Williams, and Williams's theme of dysfunctional Southern families is on nearly every page of New Orleans Mourning.

Skip, who has only recently realized that a cop is what she wants to be when she grows up, is still a uniformed beat cop, detailed to crowd control at the big Mardi Gras Parade on Mardi Gras (Shrove Tuesday) itself. As daughter to a social-climbing doctor and his wife, she knows most of upper-crust N.O., and as she watches the float of Chauncey St. Amant, an acquaintance who's this year's Rex (King of Carnival), she is stunned to see someone in a Dolly Parton costume shoot him dead from a balcony. When her superiors realize she has entree into this world, she's assigned to help with the investigation.

Smith uses changing points of view skillfully to portray the passions, personalities and problems of the St. Amant family and the family friend, Tolliver Albert, from whose balcony the shot was fired. Of course, the family were all at the exclusive Boston Club waiting for the parade -- or were they? Skip's investigation takes her from the mansions of the rich to the most squalid of New Orleans' slums. In the end, she is not sure whether or not justice has been served.

New Orleans Mourning made me think of the novels of Donna Leon, set in Venice, Italy -- a similar city in some ways, strongly influenced by and often menaced by water, with its own language and customs, its Carnival, and its civic corruption. Like those in most of Leon's books, the ending of New Orleans Mourning is somewhat unsatisfying, but sadly believable.

I recommend this highly to anyone who hasn't yet discovered Smith's series. It's only the daunting state of my TBR shelves that's keeping me from going back to reread the whole series.