King Zeno

by Nathaniel Rich

New Orleans, 1918. The birth of jazz, the Spanish flu, an ax murderer on the loose. The lives of a traumatized cop, a conflicted Mafia matriarch, and a brilliant trumpeter converge--and the Crescent City gets the rich, dark, sweeping novel it so deserves.

From one of the most inventive writers of his generation, King Zeno is a historical crime novel and a searching inquiry into man's dreams of immortality.

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.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Book Club, Thriller, Mystery Thriller, Crime

386 pages, Hardcover

First published January 9, 2018

About the author

Nathaniel Rich is an American novelist and essayist. He is the author of Losing Earth: A Recent History, which received awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the American Institute of Physicists and was a finalist for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award; and the novels King Zeno, Odds Against Tomorrow, and The Mayor's Tongue. He is a writer-at-large at the New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Harper's and the New York Review of Books. His next book, Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade, will be published in late March. Rich lives in New Orleans.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 1 out of 5]

Inconceivably dreadful. Better titled, King Zero. As in... Zero of 10 stars!

[Fran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Isadore Zeno is a cornet player in 1918 New Orleans. He could make his horn "squawk, weep, chatter, groan..." "He could do things with the cornet that nobody else knew to try". Playing jazz would not put food on the table but petty theft might! A string of robberies and murders by "ax" had occurred. It had been determined that a serial killer, an "Axman" was stalking the city. Izzy decides he better apply for work on the construction of the Industrial Canal, a project meant to connect Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River.

The Industrial Canal Project was being run by Beatrice Vizzini, Mafia widow and owner of Hercules Construction. Izzy, a Creole, secures the lowest of the low jobs digging out the river. Beatrice's business dealings are shady at best.

Who has been "axing" people? New Orleans residents are unsettled. Enter Bill Bastrop, army veteran and New Orleans police detective. Bill is fighting his own demons. To block out flashbacks of war, he immerses himself in the quest to uncover the highwayman's identity.

Three main characters with three storylines converge in the rich tapestry of "King Zeno" by Nathaniel Rich. This character driven work of historical fiction is a mix of police procedural, the birth of jazz and the building of the Industrial Canal. Many secondary characters are well developed and populate this fascinating tome. A most enjoyable read that I highly recommend.

Thank you MCD, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Net Galley for the opportunity to read and review "King Zeno".

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

New Orleans in 1918/1919: Jazz is on the rise, construction for the great industrial canal begins, and the city is terrorized by an ax murderer – all of these things really happened, and Nathaniel Rich mixes fact with fiction when he interweaves three narrative threads circling around those events.

Isadore “King” Zeno is a struggling jazz musician who tries to break through as a cornet player while finding ways to provide for his family. While King Zeno is a fictional character, Rich mixes in a lot of historic references: In 1918/1919, there was indeed a particularly inventive cornet (and trumpet) player making a name for himself in New Orleans – Louis Armstrong. He played with other gifted jazz musicians like Kid Ory (the name of Zeno’s wife is Orly, and Kid Ory is also mentioned) and his idol King Oliver (who is also one of Zeno’s inspirations). Back then, Armstrong was married to his first wife Daisy Parker (Daisy is the name of Zeno’s mother-in-law). It is also correct that New Orleans jazz musicians at first mainly played in Storyville, the red light district, before more respected establishments became interested in booking them as their popularity rose.

The building of the canal is also a fascinating aspect of the story: This deep-water shipping canal connects the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain, and it first broke during Hurricane Betsy in 1965, and then again during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, thus flooding huge parts of the city. Rich tells the story of how the canal was built, inventing a female head of the building company who is involved in crime and corruption. He talks about the first predictions of what might happen if the canal breaks, and he finds powerful images for the plight of the black workers who dug at the construction site.

Most surprisingly, the “Axeman of New Orleans” was an actual serial killer who terrorized the city at the time, but while Rich fictionally resolves the case, the real axeman was never caught. I wanted to criticize Rich for connecting the threads of the story in the most implausible way, until I found out that the real axeman (or someone claiming to be the axeman) did in fact write the letter Rich tells us about, and unbelievably, it was published in a newspaper and did really say:

“I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for you people. One thing is certain and that is that some of your people who do not jazz it out on that specific Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the axe.”

Until now, all of this sounds stellar, so as an alert reader, you might ask yourselves why I gave this book only three stars. While Rich manages to find some strong and haunting images, other parts are shaky and feel contrived. It is not elegant to let a person who is obviously dying declare “I am dying”, but it gets worse when this person declares multiple times that he is dying until he finally dies (and judging from what happened, he should have been dead long before that). Some characters, like the son of the construction company owner, remain one-dimensional and crude. Another example of a scene gone wrong would be when one of the policemen picks up his colleague, and then this happens:

“See I caught you eating pie.” He stuck a fat finger into the cream on Bill’s cheek and put it in his mouth. “I was shaving.”

He eats his colleague’s shaving cream? Or he would eat cream pie from his colleague’s face? No, people, he clearly wouldn’t. To add one last example, why is there randomly one singular sentence like this thrown in: “Lost in a daze, on a hazy crazy malaisy Friday.” Such playful choices made sense if Rich tried to transform jazz music into his language throughout the book, but he doesn’t.

These flaws are particularly sad because this novel has so much potential and could have been much stronger – In fact I blame the editor, not the author. An editor should have helped to manage the material and make the story and the language more consistent. Still, I can’t really hate on the text, because the story itself is great, the setting is great, and the narrative imagination that ties all threads together – logically, but also with slightly varying themes and poetic images - is also great.

This could have been absolutely amazing, but then it fell a little short. Still, I would love to read more by Nathaniel Rich.

[Emily May · Rating 3 out of 5]

Look, I am a little bit obsessed with New Orleans. A lot of kids while I was growing up fell in love with the romanticism of Paris, the big powerful city of New York, or the beachy glamour of Los Angeles, but I have always been fascinated by NOLA.

Jazz! Paganism! The French Quarter! Mardi gras! Beignets! When I finally visited a few years back, the magic was as I'd hoped it would be. It felt like it's own little mystical world, separate from the rest of America. And what King Zeno does is pay homage to this place; it captures a very specific feeling that perhaps one will never experience anywhere but in the heart of New Orleans.

It is very much a "book about a place". The atmosphere is wonderful, though, at times, the story dragged and was overwritten and confusing. I'm not sure a reader who doesn't give a crap about NOLA will enjoy sitting through this rather bizarre plot.

Rich takes us back to 1918 New Orleans - a place of Jazz, fraught race relations, the Spanish flu, and a serial killer. A real serial killer, as it turns out. I really enjoyed the history lessons King Zeno provided, though I also recommend reading up a little on the "Axeman of New Orleans" before starting the book. I paused reading to go familiarize myself with the serial killer and the story went down much more smoothly once I had some more background info.

In this spooky and fascinating world, we follow the lives of three central characters - Billy Bastrop, a cop recovering from First World War PTSD and experiencing hallucinations on the job while trying to catch a serial killer; Beatrice Vizzini, now a criminal mastermind after taking over her late husband's shady business; and Slim Izzy Zeno, a struggling jazz musician and my favourite perspective of the three.

Izzy's struggle in the world of jazz really pulled me into the time and place of the novel. I often found myself trying to read faster through Billy's and Beatrice's perspectives to get back to him. And I have to say - Beatrice's story with the building of the canal could not interest me in the slightest. I really tried to put on my historical glasses and get sucked into the importance of it, but it seems I just cannot care about the whys, hows and whats of building a canal. Sorry.

King Zeno is definitely a weird mishmash of a novel. There were excellent things about it, but, looking back, the one word that springs first to mind to summarize this book is: odd. It's a smart, atmospheric story that I would struggle to recommend.

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[Jarrett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Challenging to get into at the start with lots of unfamiliar names and separate plots. Read the first 50 pages a few times over before getting into the story. However last 2/3 of the book was great with well woven plot that brought together race, jazz, New Orleans, the mafia, and the Spanish flu.

[Russ · Rating 2 out of 5]

My indifference was surpassed only by my boredom.

[Andy Weston · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise of the book is certainly an attractive one, a city terrorised by an axe murderer, set against the backdrop of a New Orleans in the midst of the Spanish flu epidemic, with the birth of jazz and the the onset of prohibition just around the corner. Unputdownable you might think, but no. Rare for me, but I am critical of the amount of violence in the book as it seems quite unrelated to much of its content, dealing with a set of characters that are uninteresting and often irritating. Surely there's a good novel to be written about this period of history, but this isn't it.

[Glen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Right after WWI, a jazz loving serial killer was active in New Orleans. This is a novelization of the hunt for him. It didn't really do anything for me, sorry.

[Tad Richards · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ultimately, an engrossing, clever plot, very good mise en scene of New Orleans right after WWI, before Prohibition. But the plot takes a while to get going, and for me, the characters took a long time to coalesce—to make me feel them as real.

My main issue with the plot, and I’ll try to phrase this so it isn’t a spoiler. Everyone seems to figure out who the ax murderer is, and I’m not sure exactly how.

I do recommend the book. Not unreservedly, but I recommend it.

[Greg Zimmerman · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5.

First appeared at http://www.thenewdorkreviewofbooks.co...

In 1918 New Orleans, a serial killer gruesomely hacked his victims to death with an axe he often stole from the victims themselves. The so-called Axeman of New Orleans was never apprehended. Meanwhile, construction was just beginning on a massive canal connecting Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, bisecting New Orleans's Ninth Ward. A Spanish Flu outbreak in the city killed several thousand residents. A new form of music called jas (or jazz, as it's known now) floated through the air. And rumblings from Washington about efforts to enact Prohibition threatened to prevent the good times from rolling. (The Volstead Act passed the next year, in October 1919.)

What a time to be alive! If you like your historical fiction with a healthy dose of real-life, then Nathaniel Rich's new novel King Zeno is just the book for you.

Rich's novel takes advantages of this rich confluence of historical events in a city known for its richness of culture and tells the stories of three characters whose lives all intersect and influence each other. A poor black jazz musician named Isadore Zeno works on the canal and tries to provide for his family. The rich widow of a gangster attempts to go straight, making the canal project her last dirty deal. And a New Orleans detective and World War I veteran is tangled up trying to solve the horrific axe murders while dealing with his own demons.

These characters are as well-drawn and fully realized as the historical detail itself. One of the craziest, best parts of the novel involves the character Zeno, and is based on a real event. To try to jumpstart his failing jazz career, he writes a letter to the newspaper purporting to be the Axeman, and threatens to kill more people unless all the rich white people in the Garden District hire a jazz band for a party on a Tuesday night. Unbelievably (except that, again, this really happened!), the newspaper prints the letter and there's a big citywide party.

I loved this book, not the least because I love New Orleans. But Rich is a magnificently talented writer, clever an super fun to read. And he tells this story at a near breakneck pace. There's sex, and booze, and rock'n'rollish (JAZZ!). Highly recommended!

[Galen Weitkamp · Rating 4 out of 5]

King Zeno by Nathaniel Rich.
Review by Galen Weitkamp.

In the early twentieth century, New Orleans was the home of Joe “King” Oliver, Kid Ory, Louis “Dippermouth” Armstrong and in Nathaniel Rich’s novel set in 1918, King Zeno, otherwise known as Isadore Zeno.

Slim Izzy’s cornet “growled like a bear, hissed like a snake, and sang like a meadowlark...He slurred and growled and klaxoned...He played the happy parts melancholy and the melancholy parts happy, the raw parts polished and the polished parts raw.”

Through his music Izzy was reaching for immortality, but was yet unknown; scrounging for gigs and money. Izzy’s day job was grueling. He worked for the Hercules Construction Company which was owned by Beatrice Vizzinis, a wealthy New Orleans matriarch. Beatrice too, was reaching for immortality. Her legacy was to be a channel dug through the prehistoric swampland connecting the Mississippi to Lake Pontchartrain.

The project and the city were soon beset by a series of mysterious ax murders and a deadly influenza. The one man who was not seeking fame or fortune, but only peace and escape from the horrors of war, was the man who became obsessed with the case, Detective Bill Bastrop.

King Zeno is novel about the ambitions, the needs and the desires that motivate people to do the things they do.

[Becky Loader · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am familiar with the actual events the author uses as the center piece of his story about an ax murderer in New Orleans. He manipulates events very well, but quite frankly, there is one too many story lines here. The descriptions of the Black Hand and the corruption in local government are very vivid, but I had trouble with some of the characters.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m a fan of New Orleans. There’s good and there’s bad but there’s always the magical, especially about the past. Like the primordial swamp, there are layers upon layers, forests upon forests and people, their lives and loves, upon each other. The author captures the mood of a city in the swamp wanting to rise above those layers, the past, like the mud, tugging them back. Their struggle is the story.

Rich is able to paint a picture of this city and the struggles while maintaining the tension of an excellent suspense novel. This period in time in Louisiana - 1910s/WWI era- has provided some excellent fodder for fine writing. Rich’s writing is reminiscent of Tim Gautreaux’s The Clearing and The Missing (both HIGHLY recommended). The ability to capture the time and place in the city I Love was magic for me.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the story of three New Orleans characters in 1918-19 New Orleans, struggling with their daily life against the backdrop of a real New Orleans serial killer. One, an Italian mob wife managing a canal construction project, two, a struggling jazz musician who works on the canal, and three, a cop on the case of the serial killer. I really wanted to like this more, as much as I love jazz, New Orleans, mysteries, etc. But the characters were unlikable, the audiobook narrator bungled pronouncing many (admittedly) difficult place names (Tchoupitoulas, Marigny, etc.), and used a variety of actorly voices (some sounding like Slim Pickens in Blazing Saddles) that distracted from the pace of the book. I felt the author did thorough research on the (real) case on which many of the actions in the book take place, and I enjoyed his portrayal of the nascent jazz music scene, but the daily lives of the three main characters were dull, and the book dragged on and on...could have used a good editor.

[Alan Korolenko · Rating 3 out of 5]

Expecting a deep dive into themes of early 20th century black lives, cowardice, heroics and how the times and historic events affect everyday lives. These themes do appear but this is a well done crime story in a post World War 1 New Orleans experiencing a jazz renaissance. The story of three diverse characters form the heart of the book: a police detective seeking redemption from a battleground incident he sees as cowardice; a musically brilliant young black jazz trumpeter who uses fear of a murderer to further his music career; and the widow of a gangster running the company building the Industrial Canal and coping with her strange, ultimately dangerous son. At times Rich's prose interrupts or confuses the story's flow which propels forward to a climax where the three storylines converge.

[nikkia neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks Farrar, Straus and Giroux and netgalley for this ARC.

King Zeno is like no other book I've read about New Orleans. Its dirty, gritty, and real. This is not glamorous look at jazz, war, or the cops.

[Sam Law · Rating 3 out of 5]

Set in the New Orleans of the early twentieth century (summer 1918 to be precise), it follows the intertwined tales of three fictional characters, as they navigate the brothels of Storyville, bayous, the reek of the slums, concert halls, city jail, and the Mafia, while coping with the real-life reality of the Spanish Flu and the “Axman of New Orleans” decimating the city population. There is also rising racial tension between the police and the young black men they are harassing.

Read this and more reviews on my blog It's Good To Read

Historical Facts:
There WAS an Axman of New Orleans, leaving 6 dead and 12 injured during the period May 1918 to October 1919.
The Industrial Canal (or the “Inner Harbour Navigation Canal, to give its official name) was built between June 1918 to May 1923.
Spanish Flu, which killed as many as 50 million people globally, hit New Orleans for the first time in Oct 1918, killing about four thousand people.
Louis Armstrong was born and started out in the Big Easy, in this period.

King Zeno is a slow burn initially, but then takes off to a rollicking cracking pace. The suspense level is well maintained, told in the third person, and the author craftily blends his characters with the real-life facts.

The three main characters are:
the eponymous King Zeno, aka Isadore Zeno, a gifted Creole musician who wants to drive the new jazz movement, and in the process become musically immortal, but as yet has no real (i.e. paying) audience. His pregnant wife and mother-in-law both depend on him, leading him to temporarily try armed robbery to make ends meet. He gives up the cornet when he starts honest work on the Industrial canal. As the Axman murders gain more notoriety in the city, sparking widespread panic, Zeno exploits this to bolster his flagging/dead career.

William Bastrop, a recently-returned from France war veteran, is now a detective in the New Orleans Police Department, and suffering from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), which unfortunately was not considered as a condition in those times. Haunted by a war incident in an under-siege dugout, where he, through “cowardice thick as wet cement” saved his own life while his comrades died, he decides to try and redeem himself through solving the Axe Murder case. He does this after one of those dead comrades turns up, seeking revenge, and after his wife leaves him once she learns of the truth behind his service record.

Beatrice Vizzini is the widow of the local Mafia boss, who now has the contract to build the Canal. Being the Mafia matriarch, she used legal and illegal means to get it and hold onto it. Of course, she is NOT happy with body bits turning up in her canal, which she sees as her route to respectability. Her son Giorgio, a large cruel and sadistic hulk of a man is heir apparent to Beatrice’s empire, but becomes increasingly erratic as the book progresses, and his behaviour threatens to undermine and destroy everything she is trying to create.

The story rests on three pillars, namely the construction of the Industrial Canal between Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, the effects of World War 1,and the beginnings of the jazz movement. The Canal links all three characters throughout the book, although they don’t actually interact until the final scenes. There is a lot going on in this book, right to the end, high drama, higher body count, and this book rates well alongside its contemporaries (e.g. Ray Celestin’s The Axeman’s Jazz). I expect there will be more of these books, as we reach the 100-year anniversary of the Axman killings.

[Aaron McQuiston · Rating 4 out of 5]

"King Zeno" is the story of New Orleans in 1918/19, the story of the starts of jazz in America, the digging of an industrial canal the connects the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain and splits New Orleans from the Upper 9th Ward to the Lower 9th Ward, and a serial killer, the Axeman, who terrorized New Orleans. Nathaniel Rich takes these stories and knots them together, making for a narrative that is pretty tough to get into in the beginning but starts to meld together about halfway through. I find that a few of these narratives well trodden, but Rich's skill in writing about New Orleans, about music, and about the struggles of following your dream and providing for your family, make "King Zeno" better than in the hands of some other writers. The writing is really what carries this novel more than the story itself. There are moments, especially when Rich is describing what it is like to be digging the canal, day after day, knees deep in mud and water, when I could really smell the dirt and sweat, where I could feel the aching bones of a long day of digging, and the feeling that everything is being done for family.

The title character, Izzy Zeno, is better at the cornet than anyone else. He can make it talk like nobody else, and people are in awe when he plays. He wants to make a living being a jazz musician in a genre that is just a baby, and with a soon-to-be pregnant wife, he knows that the pipe dream of being a full time musician is just of feasible. I really liked Zeno, and even though he does do some unsavory things, he is doing what is best for his family first, even if it is breaking his spirit. Zeno is what made me read the whole novel. The other two narratives, Bill Bastrop, a detective trying to find the Axeman, and Beatrice Vizzini, the mafia head who is trying to turn her business from collecting protection money from neighborhood shops into a legitimate business all the while keeping a close eye on her son, Georgio, are decent but not as good as Zeno's story.

"King Zeno" is a solid novel with some great writing. The beginning is a little difficult, but once you get into the characters and the narrative, you find yourself on a great ride with jazz in your ears and dirt on your feet.

I received this as an ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual rating: 3.5 stars.

I was struck by how strongly this novel resembled the period novels of Dennis LeHane: "The Given Day," "Live By Night," to mention just two. Both authors place their characters in American cities in the early 20th Century, acting out stories in front of a backdrop of historical events. In "King Zeno" the backdrop is New Orleans in 1918, and includes the crossover of jazz music from black society to white society, the devastating Spanish flu epidemic, the mystery of a serial killer (the Axman, who in real life was never caught), and the construction of the very canal that decades later failed and flooded great parts of the city.

The cast of characters includes New Orleans policemen, an up-and-coming jazzman named King Zeno, and the mother and son of a Mafia family trying to become respectable by building the canal. The characters are a blend of fiction and fact: there was no King Zeno, but there was a young Louis Armstrong. The Axman mystery was never solved, but here the axman is identified and killed.

The novel is a bit of a slow read at the beginning but picks up by the second or third chapter. Some readers may be put off by Rich's attempt to put period slang in the mouths of his characters (I'm certain the slang is accurate and well-researched, but it's jarring to hear jazz called jass, as it apparently was in 1918). Others may be put off by a white author trying to write convincing black characters, but I have no issue with that and I think Rich pulls it off reasonably well. His description of the desperate lives of King Zeno and his friends is certainly grim enough, and probably right on the money ... they could work only the most menial of jobs, and for almost nothing (jazz, for a lucky few, was about the only avenue of escape).

It's a good story, somewhat marred by contrivance and melodrama, particularly in the way Nathaniel Rich uses his fictional characters to connect unrelated historical events, giving those characters important roles to play in those events; but even more so by the heavy-handed ending, where the characters all converge in a gruesome climax.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Back when jazz was jass, New Orleans was itself undergoing its own transformation, connecting Lake Pontchartrain to the Mississippi River with the Industrial Canal, thus bisecting the city for good. But in its way, New Orleans was already a bisected city of wealth and race. Nathaniel Rich uses this as his background (and foreground really) in his historical take on the city in King Zeno. Even though it has a title character, it actually revolves around a central trio, who are linked through the Axman, an ax wielding murderer terrorizing the city. Isadore "Izzy" Zeno plays the coronet, and may be the best, if only he can get a paying gig. When he's not failing as a criminal, he digs out the canal with the other blacks and Creoles of NOLA. Bill Bastrop is a navy, aka a policeman, recently returned from fighting in No Man's Land in WWI, with a terrible secret and the psychological scars to prove it. Beatrice Vizzini is trying to go straight. Her company has "won" the contract to dig the canal, thus a step in legitimizing the shadow business that is the New Orleans Mafia. Though her big, slightly dim son, Giorgio, proves to be a problem. Rich weaves all this and more in this big, lively novel. As is common with these types of books, there are many characters to keep track of, and many threads that all lead back, eventually, to its main metaphor -- the canal. Rich subtly, but clearly, is linking the New Orleans of 1918/19 with today. But he does it entertainingly and with verve. Like jazz (or jass), the disparate parts come together into one cohesive, transporting whole.

[Angelic Sword · Rating 4 out of 5]

🤔 Très bon… mais pas vraiment un polar
En trois mots : Nouvelle-Orléans - historique - enquête

« Les temps changent, dit-elle. Les gens non. »

➡️ Bienvenue à la Nouvelle-Orléans, l’ambiance est très réussie, les rues, les bars, on ressent presque la moiteur, on entend presque la musique. Bon point pour le contexte historique !

➡️ On suit en alternance trois personnages qui ont un rôle dans cette histoire. Malgré leur différence ils m’ont tous plu, ils sont attachants à leur manière et leur histoire personnelle m’a conquise.

« Sans parler de n’être pas de la bonne couleur, ou d’aucune couleur, pas assez blanc pour que ça passe, pas assez noir pour être invisible. »

➡️ Chacun permet d’ailleurs d’aborder des thèmes différents, et propres à l’époque de l’intrigue (la naissance du jazz, le racisme, le retour de la guerre, la construction d’un canal…)

« Ceux de la maison appellent ça l’instinct. Si on ne l’a pas, impossible de faire semblant. Savoir déceler la part de vérité dans un mensonge. »

➡️ Un bon livre pour moi oui, mais un bon polar ? C’est là que le bât blesse… l’enquête reste en arrière-plan, il n’y a pas de réelle surprise ni de gros suspense. Il ne s’agit pas d’un pur polar, à mes yeux il est plus proche du roman noir historique avec une petite enquête.

Cela ne m’a pas empêchée de tourner les pages facilement mais le rythme ne conviendra pas à tous les lecteurs.

Merci aux éditions Points pour ce livre dans le cadre du Prix du meilleur polar 2024.

[Alison Hardtmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

In New Orleans, in 1918, an axe murderer is on the loose, terrifying the people living there. At the same time, a cornet player is trying to find work playing Jazz, but making ends meet by helping a guy he knows rob people. It's more lucrative and easier than getting a job digging the new canal between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, but with the town and the police on edge, he's ready to call it quits and take the job his pregnant wife wants him to take. Then there's Beatrice, who has run the family crime syndicate since her husband's sudden death. She's grooming her son to take on more responsibility, but it's an uphill battle. And there's Bill, a war veteran and police officer whose PTSD is causing him to see people who aren't there. He's never dealt with the guilt of surviving a specific incident and things with his wife are strained. But if he can catch the axman, he'll win back her love and find peace.

There is a lot going on in this novel, which reflects a city in the middle of upheaval and change. Each of the three narrative threads are interesting and could certainly fill an entire book of their own. And that's this novel's weakness; there is simply too much going on. Things tie together at the end, but the novel is split into three separate stories, none of which get enough space to really breathe. This book is full of history of New Orleans (the axe murders did happen, the canal was dug, Jazz was played) and one senses that Nathaniel Rich was so full of the history of this place and time that it overwhelmed his narrative structure. I did enjoy my time with Isadore, Bill and even Beatrice, I just wanted more of them.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, the dangers of Goodreads - the reviews on this website nearly convinced me to let King Zeno languish eternally on the to-read shelf with the likes of Middlemarch and India After Gandhi, doorstops that I fully intend to get to...someday. (I have a literal to-read shelf in my study, some of whose inmates have been there for years, watching me come and go with a heartbreaking mix of despondence and hope.)

The most "liked" review of this book simply reads "Inconceivably dreadful." First, to refute the adjective, I can easily conceive of a worse book than this. Second, this is in fact not a dreadful book, but a good one.

It tells three intertwined stories set in New Orleans, 1918-19: a detective rapidly losing his mind as he's haunted by an act of cowardice in the trenches of wartime Europe; a jazz musician resorting to petty crime and ditch-digging to get by; and a Sicilian crime boss realizing that her huge, violent, idiot son may not be as much of an idiot as she thought.

The threads converge amid the flu epidemic and the rampage of an "Axman" (not the Eddie Van Halen kind) who targets grocery owners. If this all sounds ambitious and tough to pull off, it is, but Rich just about does it. You don't set a book in New Orleans unless you intend to give it capital-A Atmosphere, and Rich does that in spades. His descriptions of the prehistoric mud of the industrial canal, the back-of-town nightclub scene, and the Oysters Vizzini that the Sicilians suck down are fresh and memorable, if often horrifying. The book succeeds mainly from sentence to sentence and chapter to chapter - each little scene drawing you into its world.

The overall plot is a little less successfully executed. It develops a tad too slowly and leaves some threads feeling unresolved, as if we lingered too long on scenes that didn't drive the plot forward, and missed out on other scenes that would have. So the book is flawed, but it merits being read. Now it can leave to-read purgatory and retire to the farm upstate where read books go.

[Kathy Piselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I had to go back and reread the beginning after finishing, I was happy with this dense and chilling tale of old New Orleans. I loved the writing and attention to accuracy in language. The high point for me was the jazz explosion brought on by the Axman's letter:

"Canal Street was a pandemonium. He felt the gravitational pull as he crossed the old district, pedestrians streaming toward the electric marquees of the movie houses and honky-tonks, but he wasn't prepared for what opened in front of him. A dense confusion of brass and percussion and tinkling piano keys clouded the air and crowds spilled from every bar and tonk. A barker sold sandwiches off the back of a wagon, others sold beer and slugs of whisky, and freelance musicians weaved through the boulevard, blowing horns and banging drums, a dozen spontaneous second lines marching and dividing and merging. A streetcar, engulfed by the crowd, stalled, and its passengers sang and jumped. And Isadore let his mind jump and sing. What if this was not a passing delirium, the convulsions of a city panicked by a masked maniac - and a great plague, the impending prohibition of liquor, the trauma of a global war - what if this was a revelation?"

[Marge Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fun read, especially if you're a NOLA buff. What do a serial killer, a WWI vet with PTSD, and a coronet genius have in common? How does the digging of the Industrial Canal and the Spanish flu epidemic figure in? Read it and find out.

One thing I found troubling is the complete lack of the reality of racism in social institutions in the Jim Crow south, which would have been as obvious as the Mississippi mud (which gets significant coverage.) Did the white author ignored institutionalized racism completely out of guilt? Cluelessness? Since one of the main characters is African American and clearly would have been constrained by Jim Crow - especially as he had grown up dealing with the justice system, this made no sense.

Audio book: Narration is excellent during narrative sequences and matches the snappy zest for language that this author matches to the jazzy subject matter. HOWEVER, the narrator stinks at dialogue. His two main male characters sound like they have marbles in their mouth and a cold. Sort of like Maron Brando in the Godfather, only feeble-minded, which neither character is. It's quite odd, because he does a great job at the narrative sequences.

[JustSomeGuy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I chose this novel wanting to be transported to post-WWI New Orleans, and while we have a real-life ax murderer, a jazz musician, an influenza outbreak, racial tensions and a canal being built, it does take awhile before you feel as if you are in the Crescent City. It doesn't help that the beginning was disjointed, brutally slow and dreary to the point I almost bailed. We follow war veteran turned-cop, Bill Bastrop, as he plods through a search for the ax murderer while dealing with diversions such as a vengeful former soldier. We also follow the titular Isadore Zeno, who is struggling to get his jazz band off the ground while also working as a digger for the canal being built. Lastly, we get Beatrice Vizzini, head of the local mob, contractor in the building of the canal and mother to a son who could possibly be the Ax Man himself. I was barely hanging on to any level of interest when the three story lines finally intersect. The effort it took dig a canal out of a swamp began to feel familiar as I slogged through this one to an ending that simply didn't reward my sticking with it until the end.

[David Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to be very clear. I greatly enjoyed the content of this book. It would be probably have been a 5 star book if I had read a print copy. Instead I listened to an audiobook. *A NOTE TO THE PEOPLE THAT PRODUCE AUDIOBOOKS* It is important to pronounce names, especially famous names that are well known, correctly. Given, we speak differently here in New Orleans, but it would have been very easy to check the pronunciation of words that the reader didn't know, Chartres, Marigny, Rocheblave, and many others, especially Tchoupitoulas (Chop-i-too-lus). The reader must try 5 different ways to say it before settling on one bad choice. How hard would it have been to ask?

The author balances a myriad of very significant, world, national, and local historical events and weaves them into a compelling story. He deals with the World War 1, the Spanish Flu pandemic, The digging if the Industrial Canal, The rise of Jazz, and more and weaves them together in a geographically, culturally, and historically accurate way. Although the story does become a bit fantastical, it kept me involved and interested.

[Mike Shoop · Rating 3 out of 5]

Taut, dark, suspenseful tale set in New Orleans, 1918-19. A city in the throes of expansion with the constructing of a canal to link up with the Mississippi, fighting against the ravages of the Spanish flu, giddy with the birth of jazz, and being terrorized by an ax murderer. Rich deftly weaves his storylines together, involving three people from different parts of the city: a damaged and guilt-ridden police detective, an Italian matriarch trying to bring her family's business out of the shadows, and a poor black trumpet player on the rise. Dense with detail, numerous characters, and overriding atmosphere of horror, it plays out brilliantly, providing a satisfying ending. Rich's characters and events are realistic and chilling, his descriptions vivid, gritty, and graphic, his odd moments of humor are welcome relief, and he knows the history of New Orleans. Learned a little about jazz, life in New Orleans during that era, and about Mafia influence there. Good, solid, historical suspense. I give it a 3.5.

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

A not especially thrilling crime story set in New Orleans around the end of WWI, combining history, murder, the Mafia and jazz. A shell shocked veteran returning to work as a police detective, a struggling orphan with a gift for music, and the 1918 influenza pandemic all figure in the plot. It’s tempting to think the author sought to make a quick buck on the enthusiasm for all things New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina.

I “read” the audiobook and if you’re tempted to do the same - save yourself the trouble. The reader can be forgiven his “mispronunciation” of New Orleans street and geographic names (if you’re from the city, think of the challenges Tchoupitoulas, Manchac, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Burgundy, Dryades and Clio can present visitors). But his voice acting leaves much to be desired. At one point the 50ish mother of the villain begins to sob and wail in a voice reminiscent of Topo Gigio. And the villain himself throughout refers to his “mama” sounding like a not especially talented Elvis impersonator. Not of the quality of most Audible productions.

[Sydney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took a while to get into this one, particularly as I found the Billy plot hard to get into. A lot of different plot points going at once, some that don’t seem like they were necessary or that kind of fall off - even though it did continue throughout the book I found Bill’s backstory of the trench collapse to be kind of disjointed and not actually that necessary? The same with the killing of the innocent man Abraham Price, which was kind of just glossed over by Billy.

That said the Izzy and Beatrice plots really caught me, characters felt a lot more fleshed out, smoother to follow along.

I really thought there’d be a sort of twist ending that would cheapen the rest of the story so I’m glad it followed through with Giurgiu as the Ax Man, though I would have liked to have seen mention about the the larger corruption in the NOPD (Obitz being murdered by his partner?) before the end of the book.

An entertaining read (past the first two odd chapters) that gets more gripping as it goes and the action really kicks in (particularly parts 2 and 3).