Cahokia Jazz

September 1, 2023

In an alternate 1920s United States, a corpse is discovered on the roof of a skyscraper. Another straightforward hunt for a killer? Not when the setting is Cahokia, the ancient Indigenous city on the Mississippi that has somehow endured, now flourishing as a vast industrial metropolis vibrant with the sound of jazz and claiming people of every race and creed. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2023 Library Journal

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2023

This gritty noir murder mystery by Spufford (Light Perpetual) will hook readers with its fully realized tableau of an alternative history where the Indigenous populations in North America thrive rather than being decimated after encountering colonial forces. Realistically envisioned characters populate the pages, while the historical 1920s are on full display. Jazz, Prohibition, and political corruption are tightly and vividly interwoven with the subtle changes to society and culture that such an alternative trajectory may have produced. The Mississippian cultural capital of Cahokia is a flourishing city-state within the United Sates and is the gateway to the West. However, there are tensions behind the scenes in this metropolitan city, and one murder may undo centuries of progress. When Cahokia police detective Joe Barrow and his partner are called to a rooftop crime scene, little do they realize how this case will upend their lives and push them, and their city, on a path leading to either redemption or destruction. VERDICT Spufford has written an astounding homage to noir mysteries. A poignant drama-filled novel that his fans and readers of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian will thoroughly enjoy.--Laura Hiatt

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 23, 2023
Spufford (Light Perpetual) sets his clever latest in an alternate America where the Indigenous population wasn’t decimated by the European-borne smallpox epidemic in the 16th century. The resulting change is best exemplified by the city of Cahokia in 1922, where Indigenous people rule hereditarily and are integrated with white and Black populations. Det. Joe Barrow and his corrupt white partner, Phineas Drummond, are called to the rooftop of the Land Trust building, where a dead body has been discovered, eviscerated and missing its heart. Early indications point to an Aztec ritual sacrifice. But the two detectives soon find a link to the local KKK, whose goal is to rid the city of Indigenous rule. Barrow quickly realizes he is in over his head trying to expose a conspiracy that involves a German American bootlegger, a munitions tycoon, an Indigenous femme fatale, and maybe even the Cahokia PD. This richly imagined and densely plotted story refreshes the crime genre and acts as a fun house mirror reflection of contemporary attitudes toward race—all set to a thumping jazz age soundtrack. Standing alongside Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, this is a challenging evocation of an America that never was.

Starred review from December 1, 2023
A grisly murder exposes the seaminess and the fragility of an imagined 1920s metropolis defined by its large and thriving Indigenous population, the takouma. When an exsanguinated body turns up on a rooftop with flakes of obsidian in its open chest cavity, police detectives Drummond and Barrow chase leads in grim tenements and smoky speakeasies, mostly on the takouma side of town. Reporters pry, the mayor barks, the Ku Klux Klan agitates ominously. Senior takouma leadership--the aristocratic Man of the Sun and his elegant, world-weary niece, the Moon--hint at deep secrets going back to the days of the takouma's first contact with European Jesuits. But for Barrow, himself a Native of unknown ancestry, the case becomes increasingly personal. Spufford, who reimagined Old Manhattan so vividly in Golden Hill (2017), riffs on familiar hard-boiled types (the corrupt cop, the femme fatale) and keeps the plot brisk and violent. But the tune Spufford plays is nothing less than history of an alternative North America, and with his exuberant world building he invites us to consider the notes not played. What if the ancient Mississippi Valley civilization never waned? What if "old-world" smallpox hadn't been so deadly? The outcome, suggests Spufford, might be a society just as diverse and dissonant as our own.

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January 1, 2024
A brutal murder threatens to set off a race war in alternative-history Illinois. In reality, Cahokia was an ancient Native American settlement across the Mississippi River from what's now St. Louis. In Spufford's cleverly conceived, well-made police procedural, it's the hub of a thriving Native-led U.S. state in 1922. Native leadership there is stubbornly opposed by local whites, and the Klan is ascendant. So the murder of a white man on the roof of a downtown building, made to look like an Aztec sacrifice, is a powder keg. Was the killing committed by Natives pushing back against prejudice, or whites stirring tensions to stage a government overthrow? Joe Barrow, a Cahokia police detective investigating the case, is quickly enmeshed not just in the murder but in the politics of a city on edge. (A country, too: Mormons are agitating for their own state out west, and tensions have flared on the border of Alaska, still Russian territory.) Spufford has cleverly thought through all the Risk-board elements of this setup, from Cahokia's industries, to the intersection of Native folkways and Catholicism, to the city's various ethnic enclaves. (A lengthy afterword delivers a plausible case for its creation.) But at heart the novel is a straightforward, smart noir, with Joe torn among his police duties, his sideline as a talented piano player at a local club, an erratic white detective partner, a budding romance, and his own grim upbringing in an orphanage. The concept owes a debt to Michael Chabon's 2007 counterfactual detective yarn, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, but Joe is an original invention, steeped in complex history--a "Mississippian fusion" of European, American, and Native ideas--and torn over what do for himself, his city, and his culture. A richly entertaining take on the crime story, and a country that might've been.

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