King Zeno
A Novel
ISBN10: 1250310342
ISBN13: 9781250310347
Trade Paperback
400 Pages
$19.00
CA$25.00
New Orleans, a century ago: a city determined to reshape its destiny and, with it, the nation’s. Downtown, a new American music is born. In Storyville, prostitution is outlawed and the police retake the streets with maximum violence. In the Ninth Ward, laborers break ground on a gigantic canal that will split the city, a work of staggering human ingenuity intended to restore New Orleans’s faded mercantile glory. The war is ending and a prosperous new age dawns. But everything is thrown into chaos by a series of murders committed by an ax-wielding maniac with a peculiar taste in music. The ax murders scramble the fates of three people from different corners of town. Detective William Bastrop is an army veteran haunted by an act of wartime cowardice, recklessly bent on redemption. Isadore Zeno is a jazz cornetist with a dangerous side hustle. Beatrice Vizzini is the widow of a crime boss who yearns to take the family business straight. Each nurtures private dreams of worldly glory and eternal life, their ambitions carrying them into dark territories of obsession, paranoia, and madness. In New Orleans, a city built on swamp, nothing stays buried long.
Reviews
Praise for King Zeno
"The novel, like a city, somehow coheres, as Rich never loses control of the riotous raw material . . . Rich is a gifted portraitist of his three main characters . . . This is a novel with a high body count, but it has far too much energy ever to feel morbid."—Chris Bachelder, The New York Times Book Review
"King Zeno offers a gritty, panoramic portrait of the Big Easy, from its brothels and concert halls to the mansions of the Garden District . . . Full of sharply rendered characters, gallows humor and finely observed descriptions . . . A remarkable achievement."—John Michaud, The Washington Post
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
New Orleans Item, 5/23/18:
COUPLE HACKED TO DEATH WITH AX IN SLEEP
Joseph Maggio and Wife Slain in Grocery Home During Night
BROTHER OF MAN IN NEXT ROOM HEARD GROANS
For the last six years...