The Edgar Awards Revisited: New Orleans Mourning by Julie Smith (Best Novel; 1991)

Perusing the list of Edgar winners, trying to decide which I wanted to tackle for this retrospective, New Orleans Mourning jumped out almost immediately thanks to its utterly gonzo synopsis: It’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and civic leader and socialite Chauncey St. Amant has been crowned Rex, King of Carnival. But his day of…