"Holter Graham's narration matches the author's tense tone in this expansive audiobook...Graham handles the large cast of characters and multiple storylines with ease, ratcheting up the tension in the right places and keeping listeners engaged." — AudioFile Magazine 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 Crescent City gets the rich, dark, sweeping audiobook it so deserves. From Odds Against Tomorrow author Nathaniel Rich, one of the most inventive minds of his generation, King Zeno is a historical crime audiobook and a searching inquiry into man’s dreams of immortality. New Orleans in the early twentieth century is 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 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 for long. Listeners will thrill at the chance to engage in a little imaginative excavation.
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"Holter Graham's narration matches the author's tense tone in this expansive audiobook. ...Graham handles the large cast of characters and multiple storylines with ease, ratcheting up the tension in the right places and keeping listeners engaged."
— AudioFile
“Sprawling, yet speedy… A rich, contemporary canonization of the Crescent City at the turn of the century.”
— Vanity Fair“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.”
— New York Times Book Review"King Zeno is a great detective novel, a fitting tribute to the Crescent City.”
— Paris ReviewBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Nathaniel Rich is the author of the nonfiction work Losing Earth as well as the novels King Zeno, Odds against Tomorrow, and The Mayor’s Tongue. He is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to the Atlantic and the New York Review of Books.
Holter Graham, winner of three of AudioFile magazine’s Best Voice of the Year awards, is a stage, television, and screen actor. He has recorded numerous audiobooks and earned multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards. As an actor, his film credits include Fly Away Home, Maximum Overdrive, Hairspray, and The Diversion, a short film which he acted in and produced. On television, he has appeared in Army Wives, Damages, As the World Turns, Rescue Me, Law & Order, and New York Undercover. He received a BA degree from Skidmore College and an MFA from Vermont College.