Cahokia Jazz

A thrilling tale of murder and mystery in a city where history has run a little differently – from the best-selling author of Golden Hill.

In a city that never was, in an America that never was, on a snowy night at the end of winter, two detectives find a body on the roof of a skyscraper.

It’s 1922, and Americans are drinking in speakeasies, dancing to jazz, stepping quickly to the tempo of modern times. But in this 1922, things are a little different. Beside the Mississippi, the ancient indigenous city of Cahokia has lived on. It is now a teeming industrial metropolis, containing every race and creed. Among them, peace holds. Just about. But that body on the roof is about to spark off a week of drama that will spill the secrets of this altered world, and bring it, against a soundtrack of jazz clarinets and wailing streetcars, either to destruction or rebirth.

The multiple award-winning Francis Spufford returns, with a lovingly-created, richly pleasure-giving, epically-scaled, wise-cracking, bone-breaking novel set in a golden age of wicked entertainments.