Flag Boy

Never have Tony Dunbar's diabolically complex plotting, on-the-nose characters, and hawk-like ability to seize upon and capture everything New Orleans been on better display than in his jaw-dropping new thriller. FLAG BOY, the tenth entry in his popular Tubby Dubonnet series, is Dunbar's most wickedly clever mystery since his Edgar-nominated CROOKED MAN, as dark and stormy a tale as ever slithered its noirish way out of New Orleans.The set-up alone's enough to make you believe in the butterfly effect. Two acrobats burglarize a house; a sultan moves into a French Quarter mansion; a Mardi Gras Indian, in the wrong place at the wrong time, is wrongfully arrested; and our hero, lawyer and sometime-detective Tubby Dubonnet, comes upon a double murder while paying a social call in the wilds of Mississippi. Thus is the stage set. You know instantly-- because this is a Tubby Dubonnet mystery-- that these disparate events are intricately intertwined.Next, as Elmore Leonard famously never said, all hell breaks loose-- and with more than a touch of Leonard's own brand of wry and knowing humor. You can barely turn the page before a bloody massacre leaves the sultan's entire family dead; the Indian-- now Tubby's client-- gets fingered for this one, too; one of the acrobatic burglars hooks up with Tubby's best friend; and some way, somehow, Dunbar weaves each of these wildly divergent strands-- and a few others-- into the kind of old-fashioned puzzle mystery they just don't write anymore. It's as if James M. Cain married Agatha Christie.Nobody but Cain could pack a plot the size of all Louisiana into a space the size of a French Quarter balcony, and nobody but Christie could pull off the kind of riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside an enigma she pioneered. Dunbar does both-- and all in one slim, thrill-packed book. Although perhaps at this point his long-time fans are thinking Wait! How does he work the food in? There's always food! Well, that's there, too.