I had picked up Greg Herren's Mardi Gras Mambo at Half Price Books a while back, but kept pushing it down the TBR pile for shinier books. While I will never regret my decisions on reading order, it wound up being better than I had anticipated.
Evidently there are two books in the series that precede this, and one follow up, so I jumped in at the middle of the ongoing metaplot. Scotty Bradley is the gay grandson of two wealthy New Orleans families, with very two hippie parents. As this book opens, he's works as a private investigator with his two boyfriends, which is his first real stable paycheck. (Evidently, both sets of grandparents cut him off from the family trust funds, thus why his previous jobs have been stripper and personal trainer.) One boyfriend is former FBI, the other has a rather cloudy past. Scotty can read tarot cards, and occasionally receives visions from the Goddess.
Anyway, the book starts a few days before Mardi Gras. Scotty has convinced his two straight laced boyfriends to try Ecstasy for the festivities, while they run around in costumes that reveal how built they all are. Which is all well and good, until Scotty's dealer, Misha, winds up dead not long after Scotty buys the drugs.
Which, since Scotty was the last one to see him alive, makes Scotty the prime suspect.
There's a hell of a lot involved here, from nearly identical triplets all using the same name, to long buried family secrets. And the final disposition really doesn't make sense, since I can't figure out how a murderer could shoot someone from behind while standing in front of them. On the other hand, the tone of the book does a neat job of staying between total camp, total smut, and deadly serious, which is difficult to achieve in gay mystery fiction.
Going to have to find the other 3 books now.
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