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Leavin' Trunk Blues: A Nick Travers Mystery
Leavin' Trunk Blues: A Nick Travers Mystery
by Ace Atkins


 
First Edition. Signed.
Price: $75.00

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Description
 
New York, NY: Thomas Dunne Books (2000)

First Edition. Signed.

Fine in dust jacket.


Christmas Eve on the South Side. A gray coldness envelops the crumbling housing projects and tattered neighborhoods. In the music clubs, the blues - once as strong as the backs of the neighborhood's working class - has lost its hope and its voice. Seventy miles away - locked in a scarred prison cell - waits Ruby Walker, a woman who in every way is the South Side. More than forty years ago she - like several million Southern blacks during the Great Migration - boarded the Illinois Central from Mississippi to what she believed was her promised land. She became one of the greatest blues singers the city has ever known, only to lose it all after being convicted of murdering her lover and producer, Billy Lyons, in September 1959. Decades later, a flickering hope emerges to Walker in the form of letters from a Tulane University blues historian named Nick Savers. She agrees to an interview only in exchange for him checking out what she calls the truth behind Lyons's last hours. After arriving at Union Station, Travers - a year after searching for the lost recordings of blues phantom Robert Johnson - learns there are those who still want the details surrounding Lyons's death to remain hidden in the nibble of the blighted neighborhoods.

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