Lyrics of a Blackbird: A Jazz Age Mystery (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780979253867)

What does it cost to survive inside a system designed to break you?

Old loves, festering hatreds, and buried family secrets collide in this unsparing tale of Jazz Age New York-when a man returns from the dead, summoned home by a guilt he can't ignore.

It is 1926, the heart of the Roaring Twenties, and Harlem is the place to be. Years after disappearing Down South to investigate a lynching, David McKay, a civil rights attorney from a prominent Strivers' Row family, resurfaces in New York. His sister is dead-a brutal suicide, they say. But he's got another shock coming: she married a man she barely knew, an ambitious attorney. The man's settled into the McKay family townhouse-and he's not about to give it up.

David doesn't believe his sister killed herself-doesn't want to. But the alternative? That's even uglier. Murder. The truth is out there, and he means to find it. But he's got a problem-a secret that could bury him.

He reenters the world of the Harlem Renaissance-a society governed by suffocating rules; seductive, predatory patrons; and imperious civil rights leaders. His search carries him from the wealthy salons of Harlem's elite to the crowded tenements of its embattled poor-and a heart-wrenching reunion with the woman he had to leave behind.

Each day he stays in town, each question he asks, brings him closer to ruin. People thought he was dead-murdered. Now those same people-people who matter-want to know where he was, what he's been up to. How long before they find out? Before they unearth his bitter secret-the sin that shames him, the lie that could destroy him? When another body turns up, the questions stop. David's the answer.

A gripping historical murder mystery, Lyrics of a Blackbird confronts colorism, classism, and the corrosive cost of survival in 1920s New York, inside a system that pits a community against itself, that rewards pretense and fears truth. Perfect for fans of Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, and Chester Himes-with the psychological precision of Nella Larsen and the moral reckoning of Raymond Chandler.

(Originally titled Harlem Redux)

Author: Persia Walker
ISBN-10: 0979253861
ISBN-13: 9780979253867
Publisher: Blood Vintage Press
Language: English
Published: 12/09/2020
Pages: 468
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.17lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.25w x 1.04d