King Zeno, Nathaniel Rich
King Zeno, Nathaniel Rich
List: $26.99 | Sale: $18.89
Club: $13.49

King Zeno
A Novel

Author: Nathaniel Rich

Narrator: Holter Graham

Unabridged: 12 hr 57 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/09/2018


Synopsis

"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.

About Nathaniel Rich

Nathaniel Rich 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 for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books. Rich lives in New Orleans.

About Holter Graham

Holter Graham, winner of AudioFile’s 2008 Best Voice in Science Fiction & Fantasy for Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Acheron, is a stage, television, and screen actor. He has recorded numerous audiobooks, including much of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s bestselling Dark-Hunter series. The winner of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he has also read works by Scott Turow, Dean Koontz, C. J. Box, and Stephen Frey.  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 B.A. from Skidmore College and an M.F.A. from Vermont College.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Meike on December 15, 2017

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.......more

Goodreads review by Emily May on February 19, 2018

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! Beig......more

Goodreads review by Jarrett on February 05, 2018

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.......more

Goodreads review by Russ on May 16, 2024

My indifference was surpassed only by my boredom.......more

Goodreads review by Andy on March 27, 2018

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. Rar......more


Quotes

"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