"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.

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".

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.

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.

Nathaniel Rich’s King Zeno is the second novel I’ve read recently that takes on the Axeman Murders of New Orleans—which is fitting since it’s been a century since the still-unsolved murders were committed. (Read my review of The Axeman, by Ray Celestin.) This fictional take on the murders rotates between a police officer with PTSD, a widow who heads a major construction project in the city, and a jazz cornet player. King Zeno is stuffed with the sights and sounds of New Orleans in the winter of 1917-1918. At times, the Axeman Murders get a lost as the characters witness the evolution of hot jazz, weather the Spanish Flu epidemic, and the construction of the city’s industrial canal.

New Orleans police officer Billy Bastrup, one of our three narrators, is having a hard time doing his job. Being a cop in New Orleans has never been easy, but Billy is haunted by an incident that happened while he was a soldier in France during the Great War. He’s not always sure he’s not hallucinating. Meanwhile, his marriage is falling apart, two Black men are committing armed robbery on the city streets, and the Axeman Murders are immanent.

Beatrice Vizzini has all the makings of a criminal mastermind. She inherited her husband’s “shadow business” after his death, but now she wants to go legitimate by having her company build a canal connecting the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Unfortunately, her disturbing son is reluctant to let go of the shadow business because it gives him such an excellent outlet for his violent urges.

Our last narrator is Slim Izzy Zeno, a jazz musician who has a gift for making his trumpet talk and shout and howl. While Billy and Beatrice are interesting, fully realized characters, I really enjoyed reading about Izzy because he provides an entrée to the world of hot jazz, one of my favorite music genres. Whenever I read an Izzy chapter, I wanted more and was kind of reluctant to go back to reading about the other narrators’ woes.

King Zeno is a bit of a mishmash. If you’re not familiar with the Axeman Murders, it might be hard to see how things are going to link up. Because I read Celestin’s The Axeman, I knew about some of the intersections in advance. I’m actually glad about this. Knowing ahead of time about some of the book’s twists kept me from getting frustrated with Rich as more and more things happened to his characters that weren’t about what I would’ve thought was a major point in any story set in 1917-1918 New Orleans.

Perhaps a better way of selling this book is to say that it’s a story about a time and place, not about any particular event. King Zeno is a book to slide into and is one of the best representations of the idea of what New Orleans is (at least to people who don’t actually live there). This book is full of sin and music and I enjoyed those parts immensely.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley for review consideration. It will be released 9 January 2018.