Nick Travers

This Edgar Award-nominated short story featuring New Orleans music historian/detective Nick Travers was written nearly 15 years ago -- and then forgotten by author Ace Atkins. The story was rescued from an old floppy disc and first published in 2008, in a special, 10th anniversary edition of Crossroad Blues. To Atkins' surprise, that edition earned an Edgar Award nomination for the forgotten Nick Travers tale. The story shows Nick at his best: in New Orleans, at JoJo's Blues Bar, helping an old friend, challenging the powerful, and getting in way over his head.

Nick Travers is back where it all began.

Ten years after The Philadelphia Inquirer proclaimed Crossroad Blues “an impressive debut by a promising new talent,” the acclaimed crime novel is back in print.

From New York Times Bestselling author, Ace Atkins, comes the graphic novel adaptation of his Edgar Award-nominated short story featuring New Orleans blues historian/detective Nick Travers.

t’s Christmas in New Orleans. For many, it’s the best season of the year. But instead of spending time with the people he cares about, Nick Travers is searching for the killer of his friend, Fats, one of the best saxophone players you could find in the Crescent City. At first it appears that Fats took his own life, but Nick quickly discovers that the saxophone is missing from Fats’ apartment and he hits the streets to track it down. He soon learns that there is more to the story than a simple suicide, and the woman who Fats had been paying to keep him company may hold the answers.

In the music clubs on the South Side of Chicago, the blues—once as strong as the backs of the neighborhood's working class—has lost its hope and its voice.

With a precise eye for detail, Atkins takes Nick Travers on a journey into the hidden pockets of New Orleans, the battered roadhouses and truck stops of Mississippi, and the streets of Memphis that only an insider could know.

Ace Atkins returns with Nick Travers to the back streets of New Orleans for his best and most ambitious novel yet.

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.