King Zeno
14 November 2019Imprint: Picador
Synopsis
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. In Nathaniel Rich's King Zeno, the Crescent City gets the rich, dark, sweeping novel it so deserves.
New Orleans, a century ago: a city determined to reshape its destiny and,...
Details
14 November 2019400 pages
9781529016277Imprint: Picador
Reviews
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
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.The New York Times Book Review
A groaning board of tasty literary treats . . . King Zeno offers a gritty, panoramic portrait of the Big Easy . . . Full of sharply rendered characters, gallows humor and finely observed descriptions . . . The fact that Rich comes so close to executing this ambitious literary banquet is in itself a remarkable achievement.Washington Post
A great detective novel, a fitting tribute to the Crescent City.The Paris Review (Staff Pick)
