River Bottom Blues meets at the dark crossroads where blues and evil mingle deep in the heart of Texas.
Mitty Andersen knows darn well that Bobby Tarleton didn’t die of a heroin overdose. They’d blown enough blues harmonica notes together for him to know that the rising blues star would never let anything get in the way of his music. So when he gets the news, in the middle of his blues set at Little Queenie’s, he suspects something evil came Bobby’s way. He aims to put his ex-investigative reporter skills to work to find out what happened and clear his friend’s good name.
It soon becomes apparent to Mitty that Bobby T just might be the latest in a string murders aimed at eliminating those that play the Devil’s music and he sets out to put an end to the madness before another harmonica player succumbs to the evil that has managed to avoid capture for way too long.
Mitty hits the blues circuit with his partner in chime, Pete Bolden, and rounds up a posse disguised as a blues band. They gig the juke joints and blues bars throughout Southeast Texas and Louisiana hoping to uncover the darkness that took Bobby T away and lure it into the light. They end up playing the gigs of their lives.
Excerpt
We threaded our way through the mob and headed into the heat-scorched parking lot. Sunlight ricocheted off car windows and blinded me. The stranger had vanished.
Then it dawned on me. “That was The Wizard. I knew he looked familiar. It had to be him.”
Pete froze in mid-step.
“That’s who it was, I know it,” I said. “How could I have not recognized him?”
“He hasn’t exactly been a public figure for, like, the past fifteen years or so,” Pete said.
“Yeah, what’s it been? A couple of years since his release?”
“Something like that.” Pete said. “But why would he show up at Bobby T’s funeral? Wasn’t he sent up for murdering a harp player from Dallas? Big Joey?”
Damn. Had Bobby T’s murderer just walked in and out of the door?
