Leavin' Trunk Blues
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4.3 • 23 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
"If the streets of Chicago's South Side could talk, they would probably speak in the cracked voices of the bluesmen who shuffle through [this] soulful mystery." – The New York Times Book Review
In the 1950s, Ruby Walker boarded the Illinois Central from Mississippi to the Promised Land – Chicago. She became one of the greatest blues singers the city has ever known, only to lose everything when she was convicted of murdering her lover and producer, Billy Lyons, in 1959. She's been locked in a prison cell ever since.
Now, a flickering hope emerges for Walker in the form of letters from a Tulane University blues historian named Nick Travers. She agrees to an interview only in exchange for him checking out what she calls the truth behind Lyons's last hours.
Travers soon learns there are those who still want the details of Lyons's death to remain hidden in the rubble of the blighted neighborhoods.
First published in print in 2000, this second book in the Nick Travers series remains a classic.
"Atkins makes the unseen parts of New Orleans and Chicago really come alive ... a major player in the mystery genre."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nick Travers has it all: enough money left from his days as a professional football player to live in a converted New Orleans warehouse and a job--teaching the history of the blues at Tulane--that lets him sit in atmospheric bars like JoJo's (a "darkened cave of happiness") listening to his favorite music and occasionally blowing a few riffs on his harmonica. But the comfortable life doesn't satisfy Nick. His first outing as a sleuth (Crossroad Blues), which took him to the Mississippi Delta in search of some lost records by legendary guitar player Robert Johnson, caused Nick considerable emotional pain. This second blues-related mystery is even darker, sadder and much colder--moving Nick to Chicago in December, to the once-vibrant blues scene on the South Side, now mostly a graveyard haunted by dead or forgotten talents. One of these ghosts is Ruby Walker, the "Sweet Black Angel" whose songs about leaving the country for the city sold lots of records for the King Snake label. But Ruby has been sitting in prison for 40 years, convicted of killing her lover--King Snake founder Billy Lyons--and dumping his body in Lake Michigan. Now she wants Nick to help her prove her innocence. Pursued by a demonic killer known as Stagger Lee and his team of deadly hookers, Nick suffers almost more pain than the book's short length can bear. What constantly redeems it is Atkins's ability to bring his hero to full, rich life in the bleakest of settings--and the author's rampantly contagious love for the blues and the musicians who created it.
