A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Paris Review Staff Pick A January Pick by Salon, Town and Country, Southern Living, and LA 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 the Crescent City gets the rich, dark, sweeping novel it so deserves. From one of the most inventive writers of his generation, King Zeno is a historical crime novel and a searching inquiry into man’s dreams of immortality. New Orleans, a century ago: 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 ax 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 long.

A huge work of reference. A fresh perspective on a crucial time for courts, policing and punishment. Shows how individuals, concerned parties and vested interests drove many of the era's developments. A colourful account, which captures the essence of the period. Running to nearly 700 pages, this comprehensive work on the development of summary jurisdiction, early policing and the emergence of London's embryonic modern criminal justice system looks at every aspect of these topics from numerous perspectives and across the eighteenth century. The 'whores' and 'highwaymen' of Gregory Durston's title are just some of the dubious characters met within this absorbing work, including thief-takers, trading justices, an upstart legal profession whose lower orders developed various ways to line their own pockets and magistrates and clerks who often preferred dealing with those cases which attracted fees. The book shows how little was planned by government or the authorities, and how much sprang up due to the efforts of individuals-so that the origins of social control, particularly at a local level, had much to do with personal ideas of morality, class boundaries and perceived threats, serious and otherwise. Based on news reports, Old Bailey and local archives, and other solid records the book weaves a compelling picture of a critical time in English history, through the voices of contemporary observers as well as the best of writings by experts ever since. At its broadest point, the book spans the period from the Glorious Revolution to the early 1820s. It falls into three parts: Crime and the Metropolis-including Metropolitan crime, attitudes to crime and policing, explanations for crime, and criminal law and procedure. Policing-including policing the metropolis, constables, the watch, beadles, the role of the military, and the detection of crime. Justice-including the magistracy and its work, ways of prosecution, trial in the lower and higher courts, and the penal regimes of the day. Whores and Highwaymen concentrates on the Metropolis but also compares other parts of England and Wales. Author Gregory Durston MA, DipL, LLM, PhD, of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, Barrister, studied history for his first degree before turning to the law. He is currently Reader in Law at Kingston University.

Everyone loves a romantic rogue whose exciting exploits feature a cheeky disregard for the law, narrow escapes and lots of love interest. Even at the height of highway robbery activity in the eighteenth century, it was thought that the death penalty was too harsh for these wayward scoundrels. There was the ever-courteous Claude Duval, the epitome of gentlemanliness; the infamous Katherine Ferrers, who was the inspiration for the film The Wicked Lady; Dick Turpin, the most famous highwayman of them all; and lesser-known characters such as Tom Rowland, who dressed as a woman to avoid capture. All these and more form an entertaining volume that follows the mounted thief in their endless match against the law and a death by public hanging.