In New Orleans, in 1918, an axe murderer is on the loose, terrifying the people living there. At the same time, a cornet player is trying to find work playing Jazz, but making ends meet by helping a guy he knows rob people. It's more lucrative and easier than getting a job digging the new canal between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, but with the town and the police on edge, he's ready to call it quits and take the job his pregnant wife wants him to take. Then there's Beatrice, who has run the family crime syndicate since her husband's sudden death. She's grooming her son to take on more responsibility, but it's an uphill battle. And there's Bill, a war veteran and police officer whose PTSD is causing him to see people who aren't there. He's never dealt with the guilt of surviving a specific incident and things with his wife are strained. But if he can catch the axman, he'll win back her love and find peace.

There is a lot going on in this novel, which reflects a city in the middle of upheaval and change. Each of the three narrative threads are interesting and could certainly fill an entire book of their own. And that's this novel's weakness; there is simply too much going on. Things tie together at the end, but the novel is split into three separate stories, none of which get enough space to really breathe. This book is full of history of New Orleans (the axe murders did happen, the canal was dug, Jazz was played) and one senses that Nathaniel Rich was so full of the history of this place and time that it overwhelmed his narrative structure. I did enjoy my time with Isadore, Bill and even Beatrice, I just wanted more of them. ( )

During the final year of the First World War, three narratives and a hell of a lot of dead bodies converge in New Orleans. The main story line belongs to Isidore (Izzy) Zeno, the best young cornet player no one’s ever heard of, who believes he has a new style of jass, as it’s then called, but can’t get gigs. To make ends meet, he aids a friend who’s a stickup artist, but the risks are far greater than the rewards, and that sort of sideline is destined to cause trouble.

Then there’s Bill Bastrop, a police detective assigned to deal with the stickups but switches to homicide detail when a friend and mentor on the force is killed one night in a setup. That, in turn, leads Bill to probe the rash of ax murders that the dead detective was investigating.

However, Bill can barely hold it together, suffering from what would today be called post-traumatic stress from his wartime service. He received a hero’s acclaim, but he knows he’s a coward, and he lives with it every second. How Bill managed to be released from the army with the war still going on is a mystery itself. But suffice to say that he’s miserable, obsessed with breaking a case that will redeem him in his own eyes, for which he neglects the wife he loves.

Finally, there’s Beatrice Vizzini, a widow from an underworld family who wants to leave the “shadow business” and go straight. To that end, she’s managing the effort to build a canal that will split New Orleans in two and, the city fathers hope, restore the port to its erstwhile glory. Her sociopathic son and heir, Giorgio, may have other ideas about her business strategy, and to say he’s a loose cannon is an understatement.

Meanwhile, with all that, influenza ravages the city, so plenty happens in King Zeno. Too much, in fact, and it burdens the novel. The three narratives coincide only toward the end, when it takes a fair amount of contrivance to make that junction. The mystery hardly qualifies as a puzzle, for the solution is pretty clear early on, though the bodies keep piling up, in the streets and at the canal excavation site.

The Vizzini narrative, easily the weakest of the three because the characters are neither engaging nor sympathetic, could drop out entirely. That would also remove the tendentious, thematic passages in which Rich tries to convince you that the canal is a metaphor that links this narrative to the other two. I don’t see it.

What King Zeno> does have going for it is the atmosphere of New Orleans. You get the mosquitoes, the heat, the wealth alongside poverty, the racism, the sainted past that was never glorious. The vigorous prose lets you hear the music, too.

More importantly, the narrative conveys implicitly the crime and corruption that pervade every human interaction, the fear with which African-Americans cope constantly, and the subterfuges they must embrace. For instance, Izzy may not visit his wife, Orleania, except in secret, for she’s a live-in nanny in a white home. Even to try is dangerous, for security guards patrol the streets, looking to abuse people they consider interlopers.

Izzy’s story therefore makes gripping reading, as does Bill’s, often, but only as separate entities. As a whole, King Zeno doesn’t feel like a satisfying literary dish as much as a jambalaya of varied flavors. Some stand out, some I can do without, but they don’t go together. ( )