Leavin' Trunk Blues

"If the streets of Chicago's South Side could talk, they would probably speak in the cracked voices of the bluesmen who shuffle through [this] soulful mystery." – The New York Times Book Review

In the 1950s, Ruby Walker boarded the Illinois Central from Mississippi to the Promised Land – Chicago. She became one of the greatest blues singers the city has ever known, only to lose everything when she was convicted of murdering her lover and producer, Billy Lyons, in 1959. She's been locked in a prison cell ever since.
Now, a flickering hope emerges for Walker in the form of letters from a Tulane University blues historian named Nick Travers. She agrees to an interview only in exchange for him checking out what she calls the truth behind Lyons's last hours.
Travers soon learns there are those who still want the details of Lyons's death to remain hidden in the rubble of the blighted neighborhoods.
First published in print in 2000, this second book in the Nick Travers series remains a classic.

"Atkins makes the unseen parts of New Orleans and Chicago really come alive ... a major player in the mystery genre."