Crossroad Blues (Nick Travers) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Crossroad Blues (Nick Travers) Book

Florida journalist and former college football player Ace Atkins takes full advantage of the legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson's life, music, and strange death in his first mystery. And even though it bears the weight of two of the genre's most overused icons--a New Orleans setting and an ex-sports star as hero--Crossroad Blues is fresh and imaginative enough in all its other aspects to inspire hope for an ongoing series. Yes, Nick Travers did play for the New Orleans Saints, but it wasn't an injury that turned him into a part-time detective and full-time expert on the blues. "Nick had been thrown out of the NFL for kicking his coach's ass during a Monday Night Football game," Atkins tell us. Now he teaches the occasional blues history class at Tulane, works on his biography of Guitar Slim, and plays his harmonica at JoJo's Blues Bar--a place so lovingly described that it should be real even if it isn't. When a Tulane colleague disappears on a quest for some hitherto unknown Johnson recordings in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood, Travers goes to look for him--and walks into a murderous mess of colorful sociopaths, including a deadly teenage Elvis lookalike and a slimy record producer who not only orchestrates violent crimes but also dares to use the blues as a marketing ploy for a chain of nightclubs. More, please. --Dick AdlerRead More

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  • Product Description

    “In Atkins’ hands, the characters are as substantial as a down home breakfast of biscuits and ham with red-eye gravy.”â??Entertainment Weekly

    “Crossroad Blues is a riot of Johnson lore, driven by the sort of stories generations of blues researchers would have sacrificed their children and parents to nail down.”â??Greil Marcus, Interview magazine

    “One of the best crime writers at work today.”â??Michael Connelly

    This is the tenth anniversary edition, featuring bonus material from the author and a never-before-published Nick Travers story.

    Sixty years after 1930s bluesman Robert Johnsonâ??who, as legend has it, sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroadsâ??was murdered after a gig at a Greenwood, Mississippi, juke joint, a college professor following rumors of nine unknown Johnson recordings goes missing in the Delta. Ex–New Orleans Saint-turned-Tulane University blues historian Nick Travers is sent to find him. Clues point to everyone from an eccentric albino named Cracker to a seventeen-year-old hitman who believes he is the second coming of Elvis Presley.

    A modern, Southern reinvention of The Maltese Falcon, Crossroad Blues impressed noir fans with its nod to the masters Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and intrigued blues lovers with its meticulous attention to detail. But most of all, with richly drawn characters, a tight plot, and snappy dialogue, Crossroad Blues is a timeless story told well.

    A former Pulitzer Prize–nominated journalist, Ace Atkins is the best-selling author of seven novels, including Devil’s Garden (Putnam, April 2009).

  • 1935415034
  • 9781935415039
  • Ace Atkins
  • 30 January 2010
  • Busted Flush Press
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 250
  • 10 Anv Rei
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