Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

King Zeno

A Novel

Nathaniel Rich

Picador

opens in a new window
opens in a new window King Zeno Download image

ISBN10: 1250310342
ISBN13: 9781250310347

Trade Paperback

400 Pages

$19.00

CA$25.00

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

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...

About the author

Nathaniel Rich

Nathaniel Rich is the author of Odds Against Tomorrow and The Mayor’s Tongue. He is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and his essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, and The Daily Beast. He is also the author of a book about film noir, San Francisco Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present. He lives in New Orleans.

© Pableaux Johnson

Read Author Interview at The Lens