King Zeno

'Hugely readable . . . King Zeno would make a great Netflix series, a murky pre-Prohibition thriller poised somewhere between LA Confidential and True Detective.' New Statesman

New Orleans, 1918. The birth of jazz, the Spanish flu, an axe-murderer on the loose. The lives of a traumatized cop, a conflicted Mafia matriarch, and a brilliant trumpeter converge.

New Orleans is a city determined to reshape its destiny. Downtown, a new American music is born. Prostitution is outlawed and the police retake the streets with maximum violence. Labourers break ground on a gigantic canal that will split the city and 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 axe-wielding maniac with a peculiar taste in music.

The axe-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. 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 swampland, nothing stays buried for long . . .

'Riotous . . . This is a novel with a high body count, but it has far too much energy ever to feel morbid.' New York Times Book Review