Dark End of the Street

✍ Scribed by Atkins, Ace

• Book ID: 106869321
• Publisher: Busted Flush Press
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: en-GB
• Weight: 224 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781935415176

✦ Synopsis

Amazon.com Review

Jazz historian and wannabe PI Nick Travers comes to the aid of a young woman in trouble and gets in a lot more as a result in this lively caper involving the Dixie Mafia, a decades-old murder, political skullduggery, and a hit man who thinks he's Elvis's younger brother. A strong narrative and excellent sense of place pervades the newest outing in this good--and getting better--series, but what matters almost as much is the music both the author and his hero love, which reveals itself in the nicely cadenced prose and a plot featuring the old Delta blues men Atkins admiringly portrays. It all makes for an enjoyable evening of reading that would have been even better if they'd shipped a CD of the music Nick and his creator like best along with it. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

As a follow-up to the well-received Crossroad Blues, Atkins offers another fast-paced, hot and heavy Southern suspense yarn that only occasionally defies credibility. Nick Travers, a former professional football star who now teaches blues history at Tulane University, is approached by an old friend who wants him to locate her brother, Clyde James, a once famous blues singer who hasn't been seen for some 25 years and may be dead. In a seemingly unrelated event, a young woman visits the home of her parents who were murdered a few weeks before, collects some papers from a hidden safe, then is accosted by two thugs who take her to a Mafia-owned casino and try to force information from her that she doesn't have. Travers happens to be at the casino seeking word of Clyde James and spots the trussed-up woman on a TV monitor. He rescues her, killing a man in the process, and the two go on the run. The action doesn't let up, moving between Memphis and New Orleans as a plethora of Dixie mobsters, hit men, Klan-like Sons of the South and unsavory gubernatorial candidates are stirred and shaken. Some of the characters border on caricature, especially two of the villains, a woman named Miss Perfect and an Elvis-look-alike hit man. The only other false notes in this otherwise sharply observed thriller come in the confusing finale, a not very believable sting operation.
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