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Product Description
Christmas Eve on the South Side of Chicago: a grey coldness envelops the crumbling housing projects and tattered neighbourhoods. Seventy miles away - locked in a scarred prison cell - waits Ruby Walker, a woman who in every way is the South Side. More than forty years ago, she - like several million blacks during the Great Migration - boarded the Illinois Central from Mississippi to what she believed was the promised land. She became one of the greatest blues singers the city had ever known - only to lose it all after being convicted of murdering her lover and producer, Billy Lyons, in September 1959. Decades later, Walker agrees to an interview with Nick Travers, blues historian from Tulane University, but the interview comes with a demand that he check out what she calls the truth behind Lyons's last hours. With a tale studded with irresistible characters like the hateful Stagger Lee, and two beautifully named sociopathic females, Fast Lovin' Fannie and Butcher Knife Totin' Annie, Ace Atkins has produced another atmospheric and entertaining murder-mystery set in the sleazy romance of blues country.
Amazon.com Review
Nick Travers, who made his first appearance in Crossroad Blues, is a musicologist in the Alan Lomax tradition--a blues historian who teaches at Tulane and devotes his spare time to tracking down the forgotten greats of the past. He's been trying to line up an interview with one of them: Ruby Walker, a '50s blues songstress who's been in an Illinois prison for 40 years for murdering her lover. Ruby finally agrees to talk to Nick--if he'll look into the circumstances of the crime for which she was unjustly convicted. That takes Nick back to Chicago at Christmas, and sets him on the trail of a legendary, mythic figure named Stagger Lee, who's not a myth after all, but a man with a deadly secret and no compunction about killing to keep it hidden.
Nick's hopeless love affair with Kate, first met in author Ace Atkins' previous suspense story, gets a reprise here, too. Now an investigative reporter with a Windy City paper, she teams up with Nick to find out what really happened and spring Ruby from jail. What makes this otherwise routine mystery interesting is Nick's (and the author's) encyclopedic knowledge and deep appreciation of his subject (music, not murder). The pacing is pretty slow. If you put a little Muddy Waters on the stereo, you won't mind stopping to hear a particularly sweet riff before you start reading again. --Jane Adams
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