When music mogul Teddy Paris, a former teammate from the New Orleans Saints, visits Nick Travers and asks him to help find $700,000 taken from a rap prodigy, Nick can't turn down his friend. The missing money will pay a bounty on Paris's head that was set by a crosstown rival, a street-hard thug named Cash. Nick soon finds himself lost in the world of Gucci-lined Bentleys and endless bottles of Cristal champagne. He sets out with fifteen-year-old rap star, ALIAS, seeking a team of grifters that conned the kid. When a killer hits too close, Nick takes ALIAS with him to the Mississippi Delta for the protection and guidance of Nick's mentor, blues legend JoJo Jackson, and his wife, Loretta. Soon Nick, JoJo, and another old-school Delta tough guy do battle in the Dirty South rap world where money, sex, and murder threaten to take down Paris's empire and destroy ALIAS. As cultures clash, the story winds its way through the infamous Calliope housing projects, the newly built mansions of New Orleans's lakefront, and ultimately to the brackish muck of the Bayou Savage.
Critical Praise “As welcome as a cold beer on a hot Jazz Fest afternoon.”—Washington Post
“Reads like a blues song brought to life.”—Chicago Sun-Times
“As a writer, Atkins knows how to walk fine lines with perfect balance; his books are compassionate, hard and richly atmospheric in a way that never overshadows narrative. As much as anyone else writing, he escapes the sentimentality that bedevils hard-boiled fiction.”— Salon
Description:
When music mogul Teddy Paris, a former teammate from the New Orleans Saints, visits Nick Travers and asks him to help find $700,000 taken from a rap prodigy, Nick can't turn down his friend. The missing money will pay a bounty on Paris's head that was set by a crosstown rival, a street-hard thug named Cash.
Nick soon finds himself lost in the world of Gucci-lined Bentleys and endless bottles of Cristal champagne. He sets out with fifteen-year-old rap star, ALIAS, seeking a team of grifters that conned the kid. When a killer hits too close, Nick takes ALIAS with him to the Mississippi Delta for the protection and guidance of Nick's mentor, blues legend JoJo Jackson, and his wife, Loretta.
Soon Nick, JoJo, and another old-school Delta tough guy do battle in the Dirty South rap world where money, sex, and murder threaten to take down Paris's empire and destroy ALIAS. As cultures clash, the story winds its way through the infamous Calliope housing projects, the newly built mansions of New Orleans's lakefront, and ultimately to the brackish muck of the Bayou Savage.
Critical Praise
“As welcome as a cold beer on a hot Jazz Fest afternoon.”—Washington Post
“Reads like a blues song brought to life.”—Chicago Sun-Times
“As a writer, Atkins knows how to walk fine lines with perfect balance; his books are compassionate, hard and richly atmospheric in a way that never overshadows narrative. As much as anyone else writing, he escapes the sentimentality that bedevils hard-boiled fiction.”— Salon
From Publishers Weekly
This richly atmospheric yet action-starved crime drama is the fourth installment in Atkins's New Orleansâ€"based series featuring Nick Travers, a former professional football player turned amateur sleuth. Here, Travers agrees to help an old football teammate, now a wealthy music mogul, find nearly $1 million conned from one of his record labels' marquee stars, a 15-year-old rapper known only as ALIAS. Travers meets with ALIAS, but the brooding, self-involved punk is either too embarrassed to say how he got swindled or may have something more to protect than just his pride. Prowling the seedy side of New Orleans, Travers rubs up against social extremes - rival record producers, street urchins, old athletes and wealthy agents who make sport of separating entertainment stars from their money. In the process, Travers attracts a long list of enemies, several of whom make it openly known that he'd best butt out if he knows what's good for him. Atkins (Dark End of the Street) writes with the same lean prose and descriptive acumen that earned him praise for earlier efforts. Yet the plot of his latest is thin, sluggish and confusing (exactly who is the corpse-like figure who tries to kill Travers on two separate occasions?). Fans of the Delta blues will appreciate Atkins's inarguably deep musical knowledge - Travers teaches blues history at Tulane in his spare time - yet those looking for a good yarn may find themselves hopelessly tangled by the end.
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From Booklist
In his Nick Travers books, Atkins has demonstrated that writing a mystery is a lot like playing the blues: innovation and virtuosity are less important than the ability to find a comfortable groove. Reading him is like settling into the passenger seat for a curb-crawling drive from the staccato noise of New Orleans, through the slow funk of the swamp, to the dusty twang of the Mississippi Delta. And wiseass Travers, "roots music field researcher" and ex-pro footballer, is just the guy to steer the car and tune the dial on the dashboard radio. Here, Travers' former teammate is now a rap producer who needs big bucks to call off a death threat--and someone just conned his 15-year-old prodigy out of half-a-million bucks. After blues- and soul-related mysteries, this foray into the world of MTV and BET is a logical development. The new guard doesn't know their booming beats and angry rhymes have roots in the past, and Travers has a hard time realizing that rap might just be the blues of a new generation. Keir Graff
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