Christmas Eve on the South Side of Chicago: a grey coldness envelops the crumbling housing projects and tattered neighbourhoods. Seventy miles away - locked in a scarred prison cell - waits Ruby Walker, a woman who in every way is the South Side. More than forty years ago, she - like several million blacks during the Great Migration -boarded the Illinois Central from Mississippi to what she believed was the promised land. She became one of the greatest blues singers the city had ever known - only to lose it all after being convicted of murdering her lover and producer, Billy Lyons, in September 1959.
Decades later, Walker agrees to an interview with Nick Travers, blues historian from Tulane University, but the interview comes with a demand that he check out what she calls the truth behind Lyons's last hours.
With a tale studded with irresistible characters like the hateful Stagger Lee, and two beautifully named sociopathic females, Fast Lovin' Fannie and Butcher Knife Totin' Annie, Ace Atkins has produced another atmospheric and entertaining murder-mystery set in the sleazy romance of blues country.

'If Raymond Chandler came from the South, his name would be Ace Atkins' Kinky Friedman
'Crossroad Blues is like a classic song - the right feeling, the right note at the right time' B B King
'You can really hear the music everybody talks about so reverentially' New York Times

'The apparitions Benson creates never fail to chill and mesmerize - late-night reading fare, to be sure!' Booklist

Furious action, unbridled passions, seedy lowlife and beautiful women ... We now live in enlightened times that reassure us that, far from being a lower form of literature, pulp fiction is the term for what the best storytelling provides pyrotechnic thrills, shocks galore and excitement by the bucketload! From crooked cops to ruthless bigshots, shady operators to molls with a heart of gold, this is a highly enjoyable ride through popular literature's best pulp writers, including such talents as Charles Willeford, Ed McBain, Bill Pronzini, Ed Gorman, Lawrence Block, John D. Macdonald, Mark Timlin, Joe R. Lansdale and many more...

Resurgence in popularity of the hardboiled writing genre after such film successes as Pulp Fiction, LA Confidential and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels

'This series is getting better every year.' Amazon.com

The World Fantasy Award-winning anthology series reaches its twelfth spectacular volume. Collecting around a quarter of a million words by some of the biggest names and rising stars of the genre, this latest annual showcase of all things dark and deadly includes stories and novellas by Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Terry Lamsley, Tim Lebbon, Paul J. McAuley, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith and Hollywood director Mick Garris.

Also featuring the most comprehensive overview of the year, a fascinating necrology and a list of useful contacts, this is the one book that all lovers of the supernatural and psychological terror will want on their shelves.
Series keeps growing in reputation, winning new awards on a yearly basis

This is a thoroughly contemporary collection of phantoms, shades and spectres from acclaimed modern writers such as Alison Lurie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Joyce Carol Oates, and William Trevor, and from authors as distinctive of earlier decades as Edith Wharton, Muriel Spark or the incomparable Max Beerbohm. Other classic contributions come from Henry James, Isak Dinesen, Franz Kafka and Rudyard Kipling.

'Delectable ghost stories gathered in a new, compelling [volume].' Booklist
'This volume continues to display Phillips's high literary standards.' Library Journal