A New York Times Best Crime Novel of the Year • The first book in the Nanette Hayes Mystery series introduces us to jazz-loving, street busker Nanette, whose love life leads her into some very hot water. Nan's day is not off to a good start. Her on-again, off-again relationship with Walter is off...again, and when she offers a fellow busker a place to stay for the night he ends up murdered on her kitchen floor. To make matters worse, the busker turns out to have been an undercover cop. And his former partner has taken an immediate and extreme dislike to Nan. When she finds that the dead man stashed a wad of cash in her apartment, cash that could go to help his blind girlfriend, Nan's desire to do the right thing lands her in trouble. Soon she's on the hunt for a legendary saxophone worth its weight in gold. But there are plenty of people who would kill for the priceless instrument, and Nan's new beau just might be one of them. “Rereading the out-of-print Rhode Island Red twenty-one years after it was published, I was struck with how perfectly Carter captured pre-gentrification New York City, when young artists could still afford to live by themselves in Manhattan, dive bars thrived, and interlopers weren’t walking on the wrong side of the sidewalks with their dogs and baby carriages.” — Michael Gonzales, CrimeReads “The sweet, clear sound of Nanette’s musical voice keeps us on her corner, tossing all the change we’ve got.” — The New York Times “A terrific novel, from those witty, subversive openingsentences, to the edgy, melancholy and very satisfyingending.” —Margo Jefferson, author of Negroland “Carter’s characters rarely do what one might expect. Reading her work just gives you a jolt.” — Catapult Magazine “Nanette Hayes may be the most charismatic crime fiction heroine to appear in the last decade.” — Booklist “Style’s the thing in this breezy, sexy mystery.” — Publishers Weekly "The inauguration of a promising new series."  — Crimereads CHARLOTTE CARTER is the author of an acclaimed mystery series featuring Nanette Hayes, a young black American jazz musician with a lust for life and a talent for crime solving. Coq au Vin , the second book in the series, has been optioned for the movies. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of American and British anthologies. Charlotte Carter has lived in the American Midwest, North Africa and France. She currently resides in NYC. CHAPTER 1 I mean you Ask any Negro. They’ll tell you: a woman does not play a saxophone. Except for me. Actually, I don’t play sax. It’s more like I noodle. I never studied the horn, but I can get through a “Stars Fell on Alabama” or a “Night and Day” with little or no problem. I was a far from brilliant student of the piano but I can sight read my way through a whole lot of Bach or Bud Powell. See, I’m naturally musical—not talented—I didn’t say I was talented—just musical. At one point—what was I? Three? Four years old?—my father thought I might have been a genuine inheritor in that endless line of Black musical geniuses. But not too many of us blow tenor in front of the Off Track Betting Parlor on Lexington Avenue with a battered old hat inverted on the sidewalk. No, I think I pretty much have the exclusive on that one. But, wait. Let me explain a few things. I’m not a homeless beggar. I play music on the sidewalks of New York but I don’t sleep there. I’m five feet ten inches tall, I turned twenty-eight in January, I’m more or less a Grace Jones lookalike in terms of coloring and body type (she has the better waist, I win for tits), I’m the former second runner-up in the state spelling bee (I was twelve then), hold a degree in French with a minor in music from Wellesley (scholarship all the way), and I live in a fairly low-rent, nondescript walk-up at the edge of Gramercy Park, where that neighborhood starts to bleed into the Methodone-rich valley of drug treatment facilities, hospitals, and drooling academies at First Avenue. You know what jazz musicians are like. Always trying to stay cool in the face of the worst kind of hardships. Well, just a couple of days ago, I had come up against a pretty hard one. I was dumped—hard. I thought I looked especially cool that day. Mostly because of the two-hundred-dollar Italian shades Walter had mistakenly left in the apartment when he moved out—again. This break-up was not the kind of nuclear dogfight we had had in the past. It was just about that low-level hostility toward each other for months on end; that cold kind of resentment; that sex that’s still good but just not right. And then one morning when he goes to work he’s carrying a suitcase with his stuff in it along with his briefcase. Not to worry: Walter Michael Moore had someplace else to go. He is very good at hedging his bets, always has been. He never let go of the small rent-controlled place up on Amsterdam and I was pretty sure that around the next corner there was another lady quite wi