NO MARDI GRAS FOR THE DEAD

The third outing (Cajun Nights; Blood on the Bayou) for New Orleans suicide investigator Kit Franklyn, 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.