A good quick read | Crossroad Blues (Nick Travers Series)

Crossroad Blues, a great debut | Crossroad Blues (Nick Travers Series) | Ace Atkins

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	• Crossroad Blues (Nick Travers Series) Ace Atkins Busted Flush Press, LLC, 2010 - 250 pages average customer review:based on 23 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Series of Blues Mysteries

"Crossroad Blues" is a fascinating & engaging read because it contains many elements that keeps the reader interested - short chapters, punchy dialogue, intriguing character development & rich descriptions of the Mississippi Delta. The author seamlessly weaves the musical essence of the 1930s blues scene with a complete immersion into present day New Orleans culture. We are treated to a glimpse of life behind the facade erected for tourist consumption, & see gritty realism. We blues fans applaud this mystery series!

A good quick read

This novel is entertaining and filled with good blues trivia, but it suffers from many of the flaws I've seen in other series works. Implausibility - the lack of realistic reaction by the world at large - characters acting wildly beyond rational without the proper buildup. The hero of the story, Nick Travers, is an ex-New Orleans Saints football player who decked his coach (we are shown how this was justified) and then went on to become a blues historian, professor (though you never actually see him doing this) harmonica player for a blues band (none of the other members of which you ever meet) and pretty much of a drunk from the amount of alcohol consumed during the story. Then you meet the kid who looks just like Elvis and wants to be the "E" of killers, who is one moment a Tae Kwan Do expert, and the next a complete doofus. You meet Jojo, owner of a blues bar in the big easy (the last REAL juke joint) - Cracker, and albino black man who was the last to see Robert Johnson alive, and a constant stream of others. Most of the characters start out realistic and well drawn and then become more and more ridiculous as the struggling plot requires it of them.

Don't get me wrong. The story is entertaining - it just isn't any more than it appears to be on the surface - a very quick read requiring little concentration, and easily forgotten. The background material on the blues is very good, and that alone makes this one worth reading, but if you are looking for memorable, believable characters and action, you need to look elsewhere.

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Crossroad Blues, a great debut

Nick Travers, a former football player, is now employed by Tulane University in New Orleans teaching the history of the blues. In his spare time, he is a "tracker" and scholar, seeking gap-filling information about blues singers in the last century. His particular interest is in Guitar Slim. Travers also plays blues at JoJos Blues Bar.

A Tulane colleague, who was following leads about some missing Robert Johnson music, goes missing himself, and Travers, knowing the area and the people, agrees to look into it. Along the way, he tangles with a tantalizing redhead, a wily albino with more information than is good for him, a lethal Elvis lookalike and other dangerous types following the same path, looking to score from supposedly missing records Johnson made before his death.

Atkins is so highly skilled at evoking atmosphere-you feel like you're traveling down through the Delta with him, stopping at jukes, having a po boy on the road or a beignet in New Orleans, listening to some great music. He creates a believable protagonist, who wrestles with some dangerous adversaries as well as the question of how to keep the blues alive without exploiting it. This is fine crime fiction, but it is these other elements that makes the novel sing.

It's hard to believe a 25-year old (which Atkins was when he first wrote it) had the nerve and talent to write this exciting and evocative book. You can feel the excitement and enthusiasm of the young author in every sentence. Such ardor is a gift of youth.

Highly-recommended.

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Blues Myster Thriller I

Dr. Randy Sexton is head of the Jazz and Blues Archives at Tulane University in New Orleans. One of his associates, Michael Baker, a tenured professor in music history, went to the Mississippi Delta to research Robert Johnson, a blues musician who many believe was murdered in 1938. Michael went missing and Dr. Sexton is worried because the Mississippi police aren't, so he sends Nick Travers, who teaches the history of blues at Tulane, to find him. Thus begins Nick's adventurous career as a white mole immersed in black music that, so far, has spawned four Ace Atkins novels.

CROSSROAD BLUES maintains a fast-paced mystery plot while giving rich insights into the jukes of the Mississippi Delta, the blues and the colorful characters who created this music. Atkins writing is a bit rough in CROSSROAD BLUES, which is littered with whacky similes that I found irritating at first, although eventually wry, and some of his sentence fragments are mysteries in themselves. Nevertheless, I recommend the Nick Travers series for its unique approach to the mystery thriller genre.

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?In Atkins? hands, the characters are as substantial as a down home breakfast of biscuits and ham with red-eye gravy.??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.??Greil Marcus, Interview magazine

?One of the best crime writers at work today.??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 Johnson?who, as legend has it, sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads?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).

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

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