Nick Travers, who made his first appearance in Crossroad Blues, is a musicologist in the Alan Lomax tradition--a blues historian who teaches at Tulane and devotes his spare time to tracking down the forgotten greats of the past. He's been trying to line up an interview with one of them: Ruby Walker, a '50s blues songstress who's been in an Illinois prison for 40 years for murdering her lover. Ruby finally agrees to talk to Nick--if he'll look into the circumstances of the crime for which she was unjustly convicted. That takes Nick back to Chicago at Christmas, and sets him on the trail of a legendary, mythic figure named Stagger Lee, who's not a myth after all, but a man with a deadly secret and no compunction about killing to keep it hidden.

Nick's hopeless love affair with Kate, first met in author Ace Atkins' previous suspense story, gets a reprise here, too. Now an investigative reporter with a Windy City paper, she teams up with Nick to find out what really happened and spring Ruby from jail. What makes this otherwise routine mystery interesting is Nick's (and the author's) encyclopedic knowledge and deep appreciation of his subject (music, not murder). The pacing is pretty slow. If you put a little Muddy Waters on the stereo, you won't mind stopping to hear a particularly sweet riff before you start reading again. --Jane Adams -- From Amazon.com Amazon.com Review