Welcome to Litsy!

This New York noir tale of a saxophone-playing amateur detective takes some jazzy twists Saxophonist Nanette Hayes, a majestic five-foot-ten-inch Grace Jones lookalike with hot style, lives for the music of her jazz forebears. Self-taught Nan is no Charlie Parker, but she dreams big. She performs regularly�on the sidewalks of New York City. Not exactly the Village Vanguard, but it pays the bills in ways that her master�s degree in French does not. Mostly, Nanette just tries to stay cool in the face of the worst kinds of hardship. Recently, this has taken the form of getting dumped�hard�by her live-in boyfriend, Walter. When her normally messy life is at its epic messiest, fellow street musician Sig walks up, and�after insulting her playing and narrowly missing being hit by a bus�changes everything. Out of nowhere, sixty grand that can�t possibly be legit appears in Nan�s sax. Suddenly she is contending with two grisly murders, a former lover who wants her back, a jazz-obsessed ex-con, and some scarifying cops who are trying to shake her down. Equal parts tough and romantic, Nanette uses her street-musician smarts and her New York City savvy to try to save her own skin and solve a musical mystery no less a legend than Bird himself. Rhode Island Red is the first book in the Nanette Hayes Mystery series.