Dark End of the Street (Nick Travers) - Hardcover

Atkins, Ace

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060004606 ISBN 13: 9780060004606

Publisher: William Morrow, 2002

Synopsis

Hired to track down a friend's lost brother, Nick Travers finds himself in the casinos of Tucina, where meets up with the local mafia, a zealous gubernatorial candidate with shady connections, and an Elvis-obsessed killer.

About this title

About the Author

Ace Atkins, an Alabama native, earned nominations for the Pulitzer Prize and the Livingston Award for his work covering crime at the Tampa Tribune. He now lives on a century-old farm outside Oxford, Mississippi, with his faithful mutts Elvis and Polk Salad Annie. And yes, Ace is his real name.

Reviews

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.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Atkins' Nick Travers series does for the blues what Bill Moody's Evan Horne novels do for jazz. Both series star musicians with a taste for history and crime solving. The harmonica-playing Travers, a former New Orleans Saint defensive end, is a "blues tracker"--he specializes in hunting information on and recording oral histories of long-lost or dead blues musicians. This time he widens his range a bit to track sixties soul singer Clyde James, the brother of Nick's second mother, blues singer Loretta. Soon the hunt for James becomes part of a larger picture involving the murder of a coed's parents and the Dixie Mafia's plans for gambling in Tennessee. Jumping from New Orleans to Memphis to Tunica, Mississippi, Nick unearths skeletons from a motherlode of closets, all the while finding time for pithy musical analysis ("Motown was black music for white teens; Memphis soul was black music for blacks"). The head-banging is a mite cartoonish this time, but the musical ambience and the amiable cast more than compensate. Toe-tapping good fun for anyone who cares about the blues. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060004606
• ISBN 13: 9780060004606
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336