New Orleans, 1918. The birth of jazz, the Spanish flu, an axe murderer on the loose. The lives of a traumatized cop, a conflicted Mafia matriarch, and a brilliant trumpeter converge. In Nathaniel Rich's King Zeno, the Crescent City gets the rich, dark, sweeping novel it so deserves.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 axe-wielding maniac with a peculiar taste in music.The axe murders scramble the fates of three people from different corners of town.Detective William Bastrop is an army veteran