Carmela and her gal
pal, Ava, are dressed to kill for Jekyl Hardy's Mardi Gras party
at his to-die-for apartment in the French Quarter. Jekyl is a float
designer. Ava and Carmela are good friends, but so different in
tastes. Ava runs a Goth shop, dresses slightly trampy, prefers style
magazines to books and loves to party. Carmela can be pretty vampy—only
if necessary—and enjoys going out, but her scrapbooking store,
Memory Mine, is at the forefront of her mind. In the midst of the
chatting, music and drink, Carmela's timing tomorrow's opening.
Selling green and purple ribbons and paper will put gold in her
pocket. Carmela and Ava are of the same mind when it comes to amateur
sleuthing. They work together and confide in each other.
During the party Carmela
and Ave meet Archie, Jekyl's neighbor and possible lover. Unfortunately
the two run into Archie again after he's been garroted with a barbed
wire. Carmela isn't impressed with the lousy police work in securing
the scene or how the case is handled later. She is impressed with
the detective who ends up with the case — detective Edgar
Babcock. Problem is every time things get personal, her soon-to-be
ex, Shamus, pops up.
Needless to say the
girls live the highlife attending party after party. Ava socializes
while Carmela hunts down suspects and clues. It's a deadly party
between the pages as these two take on the New Orleans police dept,
a Russian mobster, a rare coin dealer and a drug dealer, all the
while searching for buried treasure alone in dangerous places.
Laura Childs' scrapbooking
characters are different from those in her Tea Shop series. The
scrapbooking duo dwells on clothes, appearances and guys —
a very, very tame Sex and the City. With her unique characters
and twists and turns, Childs knows how to put a mystery together.
Always entertaining...
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