NO MARDI GRAS FOR THE DEAD

The third outing (Cajun Nights; Blood on the Bayou) for New Orleans suicide investigator Kit Franldyn, whose dog disinters a jawbone in her soon-to-be rose garden--a jawbone that her mentor Andy Broussard, Chief Medical Examiner, explains belongs to a woman dead at least ten years. Who was she and what happened to her? A prostitute, it turns out, but then a tipster who suggests meeting Kit at the Aquarium, after midnight, is pitched into the shark tank, and each of the members of Broussard's gourmet dinner party--a group of esteemed medical experts--nonchalantly lies to her, for reasons she can't fathom. Meanwhile, two Rose Society members insist she sniff their possible entries in the impending new-bloom competitions, and she has a tiff with her alligator-farmer boyfriend. Furthermore, Broussard will discover peculiar dumbbell-shaped inclusions in brain matter, and his dinner party guests are confessing to the jawbone death, then committing suicide at an appalling rate--but is it suicide? Before the close, Kit will be chased by two wild boars, a Vietnamese pig, and, of course, the murderer in the rose garden. Amiable, lightweight medical thriller, but the series would be much improved if it retired Broussard and developed Kit more.