The Queen of the Rex Ball at New Orleans' raucous and world-famous Mardi Gras-beautiful, vibrant, and dressed in an ivory silk lame gown with chevrons and gold beading-collapses and dies. Was foul play involved?

Jenna Depreaux, a maiden in the Queen's court, is rich, popular, and jealous. By any measure -birth, social standing, looks-she should have been selected queen. Or so she believes. Is there blood on her hands?

Detective Decker O'Day is on the case. A tough kid from the Irish Channel, he is the son of a cop who was beaten to death on the job and a mother who lost her way to alcohol and promiscuity. He teams up with Detective Gail Waites. She carries her own baggage: a Black woman and a lesbian, her daughter is found dead under mysterious circumstances-nude and drugged, and dumped outside University Hospital.

Meanwhile: Two gunmen kill fifty-three souls at a Jewish Synagogue in town. A popular anchor at the local TV news station disappears without a trace. A woman is killed when an unidentified pair drops a cinderblock from an overpass, smashing the windshield of her car.

As the bodies pile up, as New Orleans society closes ranks, O'Day and Waites must avoid attempts on their own lives and puzzle together the disparate crimes. Are the events connected? Conflicts arise and tempers flare in this taught and picaresque psychological thriller.