Dirty South

by Ace Atkins Narrated by Dion Graham

Overview

When music mogul Teddy Paris, a former teammate from the New Orleans Saints, visits Nick Travers 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 crosstown 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. When a killer hits too close, Nick takes ALIAS with him to the Mississippi Delta for 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 lakefront, and ultimately to the brackish muck of the Bayou Savage.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times

Although Nick would rather be back in the Mississippi Delta, he's at home on this turf, a hip guide who knows exactly where to walk without stepping on anybody's toes. — Marilyn Stasio

The Washington Post

Atkins's story of rap world murder and duplicity threatens to spin out of control a few times, but mostly he keeps it moving at a steady pace; his unsentimental portrait of the angry and confused rapper Alias is one of the novel's highlights. But what I enjoyed most about Dirty South were its many glimpses of New Orleans. Atkins knows and loves the city, and loathes what tourism and gentrification have done to it, and he brings to life its incomparable food, music and funky charm. If you know what it means to miss New Orleans, his book will be as welcome as a cold Dixie beer on a hot Jazz Fest afternoon. — Patrick Anderson

Publishers Weekly

This richly atmospheric yet action-starved crime drama is the fourth installment in Atkins's New Orleans-based series featuring Nick Travers, a former professional football player turned amateur sleuth. Here, Travers agrees to help an old football teammate, now a wealthy music mogul, find nearly $1 million conned from one of his record labels' marquee stars, a 15-year-old rapper known only as ALIAS. Travers meets with ALIAS, but the brooding, self-involved punk is either too embarrassed to say how he got swindled or may have something more to protect than just his pride. Prowling the seedy side of New Orleans, Travers rubs up against social extremes-rival record producers, street urchins, old athletes and wealthy agents who make sport of separating entertainment stars from their money. In the process, Travers attracts a long list of enemies, several of whom make it openly known that he'd best butt out if he knows what's good for him. Atkins (Dark End of the Street) writes with the same lean prose and descriptive acumen that earned him praise for earlier efforts. Yet the plot of his latest is thin, sluggish and confusing (exactly who is the corpse-like figure who tries to kill Travers on two separate occasions?). Fans of the Delta blues will appreciate Atkins's inarguably deep musical knowledge-Travers teaches blues history at Tulane in his spare time-yet those looking for a good yarn may find themselves hopelessly tangled by the end. (Mar. 2) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In Atkins's fourth Nick Travers title (after Dark End of the Street), the football player turned folk and jazz researcher agrees to help a former teammate. Teddy Paris is threatened with murder and the destruction of his music production company if he doesn't relinquish his hottest new rap star to his major competitor. With only 24 hours to save his friend, Nick must win the trust of the rap wunderkind while navigating the lies and personal agendas of New Orleans producers, agents, and street urchins. When Teddy's brother is murdered and Nick discovers that his life is in danger as well, the plot is propelled into a rousing finish reminiscent of a Keanu Reeves action flick. Atkins wisely sets this story of a reluctant hero confronting unknown adversaries against an exotic backdrop, adding eerie overtones to an otherwise straightforward plot. Atkins devotees will welcome additional insight into Nick Travers, while action fans will applaud the novel's breathtaking climax. Recommended for genre collections.-Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Nick Travers, erstwhile football player, blues historian extraordinaire, and latter-day knight errant, breaks still another lance in behalf of a beset friend. Nick's fourth outing begins with Teddy Paris-who once partnered Nick in terrorizing NFL quarterbacks as part of a legendary New Orleans Saints defense-clamoring for his help. Until recently Teddy had it made as boss of Ninth Ward Records, among the industry's hotter labels. Now the rap producer suddenly sees his success unraveling and a truly scary ultimatum hanging over his head. Somehow somebody's conned a million dollars from Alias, a 15-year-old rap phenom on whose skinny shoulders Ninth Ward Records had been building its stairway to heaven. Is Teddy the culprit? He says no, but a certain hard-eyed, mean-spirited, single-minded competitor whose resolve and general outlook were largely shaped during a stint in Angola Prison, and who now claims a substantial portion of the stolen swag, begs to disagree. He's given Teddy, who takes him as seriously as everyone else on the planet does, exactly one day to show him the money. "I only got twenty-one hours of my life left," Teddy tells Nick mournfully. So with a bluesy sigh, Nick slips into his Superman duds. As usual (Dark End of the Street, 2002, etc.), Atkins's sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, always colorful characters are better than his overstuffed plot. Agent: Richard Pine/Arthur Pine Associates

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191775906
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	07/30/2024
Series:	Nick Travers , #4
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Dirty South Chapter One

Sirens ain't nothin' but ghosts. They reach out every damn night, red and blue, white spotlight flashin' 'cross your eyes as you sleep on that concrete floor patterned in blood and dirt. You covered in a torn yellow blanket that once hid your dead mamma for weeks. In its touch, you see a bit of her cold ear and the edge of that face you tried not to imagine while you kept goin' to school, cuttin' her las' ten dollars in a hundred ways at Rob's Party Store down on Claiborne. You remember? Don't you?

Back then, you hold your own in the Calliope yard, the ole CP-3, and find your only friends are a mean-ass pit bull you call Henry and a little rottweiler with short legs you name Midget. Your mamma stay alive to you for weeks underneath that blanket. Through it all, she stay like she is 'cause that room don't have no heat and it's February, like it is now, and her own family live on the other side of the project.

Y'all know Calliope — its own little galaxy in New Orleans. Findin' your people on the other side is like shootin' over to the moon. They long ago forgot about her. Don't know you. Your daddy ain't nothin' but a word and the only future you see come from a box of Bally shoes you traded for two of your mamma's rocks out in the yard. Henry and Midget backin' you up like thugs in the rope-and-barbed-wire collars you made for them. A hundred windows covered in aluminum foil watchin' you like eyes stand on the grassless ground.

You take those shoes down to some fancy-ass shoppin' mall by the Quarter. The dollar you spend on a streetcar is the last green you have. Ten minutes later, that worn box of shoes you wasgonna return for a hundred dollars — like that man said — is dumped out on the street along with your ole mongrel ass. But you don't cry.

Why would you?

Don't take that streetcar. You walk. All damned day. It's a day from Calliope.

It's dark when you get back. You remember. You thinkin' about it all tonight with the sirens and the spotlights and them ghostful sounds.

It was Friday and Calliope was workin' plenty down the cross streets. Strawberries' heads bobbin' in white men's Lexuses and Hondas. Boys you once knew jacked up as hell, wide-eyed and watchin' for drugheads to slow down and make that deal. Shit made out of flour and toilet water.

Room a hotbox when you crawl up the fire escape. Television on, playin' BET and Aaliyah. She on a sailboat but dead. Like your mamma. You can smell Mamma now and you want to shake her awake, have her find people she know but you don't, to get somethin' to eat. Your belly all swole up after four days without food. You hungry and you know you need it. It hurt to even swallow.

Knock on the door. Ole man who you seen your mamma kneel before on the stairwell is smilin' at you with a wrench in his hand. He tell you he hooked you up, but then he see your mamma, nothin' but a hidden hump, and you duck under his arm as he walk back and puke on hisself.

Five days out of juvie, you back with a forty-year-old woman callin' herself your grandmamma. You only know her as a woman your mamma would see and turn the other way to spit. Your grandmamma don't like you. Make you run around like you work for her, makin' corner deals by the Stronger Hope Church. Bringin' her weed pipe to her with copies of Jet and Star. But you got a place on a small couch next to your twelve-year-old uncle who has fits and drools on himself when he don't take his pills.

They got food, too. Cold Popeyes and cans of green things you ain't never tasted. You gain a little weight, start pocketin' bus money she give you to go to school, and buy a dictionary, even though you don't know most of the words in it. You want to be like the silver mask on the bus signs. Diabolical. He don't have no eyes or a body, just a silver face. God? You'd heard about him comin' from the Calliope and how he makin' rhymes from all the words he know.

Sometime when you on the corner, hearin' your own beat and bounce in your head, rhymin' for fifty cents for some hustler to smile, you see Dio's face on a passin' bus. He comin' back. He'll hear you.

One night you find a white girl and you rob her with a knife you made from an oak tree splinter. Don't feel bad. She's pretty fucked up and lookin' for some more shit to fill her head. You scare her good and she runs away. With that money, you start it all.

Thirty-two damned dollars. Water into wine, what Teddy always say.

You buy a minimixer with a dual cassette made for a kid and a beat tape. You got a microphone about the size of your finger. But it's all you need to make your own.

It's all you do. Sleep on Grandmamma's couch, run her business, run her drugs a bit, and make them tapes. You sell them. They cost you a dollar at Rob's; you sell 'em for three. Pretty soon — we talkin' weeks, man — you known. Calliope ain't no galaxy; it's a planet. It's your planet. You grabbin' your toy and hittin' Friday- and Saturday-night block parties and you eatin'...

Dirty South. Copyright © by Ace Atkins. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.