Atkins Ace Скачать все книги 5 Количество книг

This sequel to the original best-selling takes a literary tour through some of the darkest writing in New Orleans history.

From the critically acclaimed, award-nominated author comes a new noir crime classic about one of the most notorious trials in American history.

Critics called Ace Atkins's Wicked City 'gripping, superb' (Library Journal), 'stunning' (The Tampa Tribune), 'terrific' (Associated Press), 'riveting' (Kirkus Reviews), 'wicked good' (Fort Worth Star-Telegram), and 'Atkins' best novel' (The Washington Post). But Devil's Garden is something else again.

San Francisco, September 1921: Silent-screen comedy star Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle is throwing a wild party in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel: girls, jazz, bootleg hooch… and a dead actress named Virginia Rappe. The D.A. says it was Arbuckle who killed her – crushing her under his weight – and brings him up on manslaughter charges. William Randolph Hearst's newspapers stir up the public and demand a guilty verdict. But what really happened? Why do so many people at the party seem to have stories that conflict? Why is the prosecution hiding witnesses? Why are there body parts missing from the autopsied corpse? Why is Hearst so determined to see Fatty Arbuckle convicted?

In desperation, Arbuckle's defense team hires a Pinkerton agent to do an investigation of his own and, they hope, discover the truth. The agent's name is Dashiell Hammett, and he's the book's narrator. What he discovers will change American legal history – and his own life – forever.

'The historical accuracy isn't what elevates Atkins' prose to greatness,' said The Tampa Tribune. 'It's his ability to let these characters breathe in a way that few authors could ever imagine. He doesn't so much write them as unleash them upon the page.' You will not soon forget the extraordinary characters and events in Devil's Garden.

What would you do if you only had twenty four hours to save the life of a friend?

Searching for lost souls and solving problems was never Nick Travers’s intention when he started doing favors for his buddies. A former football player who sometimes teaches blues history at Tulane, Nick would rather just watch the Louisiana rain and listen to old Muddy Waters records.

But when music mogul Teddy Paris, a former team-mate from the New Orleans Saints, visits Nick and asks him to help find $700,000 taken from a rap prodigy, Nick can’t turn down his friend. The missing money will pay a bounty on Paris’s head that was set by a cross-town rival, a street-hard thug named Cash.

Nick soon finds himself lost in the world of Gucci-lined Bentleys and endless bottles of Cristal champagne. He sets out with fifteen-year-old rap star, ALIAS, seeking a team of grifters that conned the kid. But uncertainty, the constant threat of violence, and a phantom grave robber haunt their search. When a killer hits too close, Nick takes ALIAS with him to the Mississippi Delta, where he comes under the protection and guidance of Nick’s mentor, blues legend JoJo Jackson, and his wife, Loretta.

Soon Nick, JoJo, and another old-school Delta tough guy do battle in the Dirty South rap world where money, sex, and murder threaten to take down Paris’s empire and destroy ALIAS. As cultures clash, the story winds its way through the infamous Calliope housing projects, the newly built mansions of New Orleans’s lake-front, and ultimately to the brackish muck of the Bayou Savage.

Dirty South is a thrilling tale of friendship, betrayal, revenge, and trust from a fresh and hip new voice. Take a ride to the other side of New Orleans, away from the neon gloss of Bourbon Street, to see what the dirty south is all about.

In 1955, Look magazine called Phenix City, Alabama, “The Wickedest City in America,” but even that may have been an understatement. It was a stew of organized crime and corruption, run by a machine that dealt with complaints forcefully and with dispatch. No one dared cross them – no one even tried. And then the machine killed the wrong man.

When crime – fighting attorney Albert Patterson is gunned down in a Phenix City alley in the spring of 1954, the entire town seems to pause just for a moment – and when it starts up again, there is something different about it. A small group of men meet and decide that they have had enough, but what that means and where it will take them is something they could not have foreseen. Over the course of the next several months, lives will change, people will die, and unexpected heroes will emerge – like “a Randolph Scott western,” one of them remarks, “played out not with horses and Winchesters but with Chevys and.38s and switchblades.”

Peopled by an extraordinary cast of characters, both real and fictional, Wicked City is a novel of uncommon intensity – rich with atmosphere and filled with sensuality and surprise.