I’m also on the waiting list at St. Olaf’s.”
“Saint who? Who the heck is he?”
“I don’t know. It’s a college in Minnesota. One of the boys I met on my trip to France is going there.”
“Minnesota,” he repeated, incredulous. “Please pass me a scone.”
“I’d like to see more of the world,” she said.
The exchange above is from a conversation between Tubby Dubonnet, hero of Shelter from the Storm, fourth book in Tony Dunbar’s Tubby Dubonnet series, and one of his daughters. It’s typical of the droll quality of the dialogue in these books, though I mainly chose it because it’s a rare reference to Minnesota and a Norwegian-American school.
By the way, it’s “St. Olaf,” not “St. Olaf’s.” A typically Catholic mistake.
Anyway, in Shelter From the Storm, a Texas outlaw named LaRue has hired some local criminals in New Orleans to help him crack a bank safe deposit vault during Mardi Gras, when he figures no one will be paying a lot of attention. (He is correct in this.)
What he doesn’t expect is rain – not just ordinary rain, but a torrential monsoon that cancels parades and floods the streets and knocks out power in the city. When things go wrong, LaRue has a tendency to shoot people. One of the people he shoots happens to be a new legal client of Tubby Dubonnet’s, and Tubby takes that seriously. He can’t call the police because the phones are out and they’re kind of busy rescuing people, but he’ll chase the miscreants on his own. Even if it means neglecting the new girlfriend he’s met.
If that seems a little over the top, well, Tubby can surprise you sometimes. He’s a fairly lazy fellow, but he has spirit. These books are rich in quirky characters – a little too quirky for my taste sometimes, though amusing.
As I’ve said before, I don’t love the Tubby Dubonnet books, but I don’t hate them either. I have a fairly low threshold for quirkiness, and New Orleans isn’t really my kind of town.
I must also complain that Shelter from the Storm ended with a sort of a cliff-hanger, which is an offense in my code.
But the books are popular, so what do I know?