Drumsticks

Description

Nanette Hayes is sassy and brassy, as befits a statuesque street sax player improvising her way through Manhattan, mystery, and murder. After an April in Paris she'd rather forget, Nanette is back in New York, looking for gigs and staking out her favorite corners (without telling her mother, who thinks Nanette is teaching French at NYU). She's hit rock bottom and is crankily content to stay there, when a gift "mojo doll" from Harlem folk artist Ida Williams starts turning her luck around. But when Ida is suddenly shot to death in the middle of Nanette's new uptown gig, the guilt-stricken saxophonist wants to know why. Her investigation takes her from Ida's suspiciously checkered past to the recent murder of Black Hat, a rising young rap star; as Nanette struggles to make sense of these discordant notes, she and her closest friends find themselves whistling in an increasingly threatening dark. Charlotte Carter, who introduced Nanette in Rhode Island Red and followed it up with Coq au Vin, has a hot property in her heroine, whose independence and wry self-deprecation echo Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone (N Is for Noose, O Is for Outlaw). Nanette's gleeful sense of the absurd will also have readers thinking of Janet Evanovich's New Jersey bounty hunter Stephanie Plum (High Five, Hot Six). Unfortunately, Carter can't quite match Grafton's ability to weave tricky and disturbing plots, nor Evanovich's razor-sharp, dead-on prose. Drumsticks will satisfy readers eager for more of Nanette's quick tongue and keen wit, but its incoherent plot and half-hearted attention to secondary character development too often detract from its heroine's obvious appeal. Turn off the logic switch in your brain, then, and read for the sheer pleasure of Nanette's voice. --Kelly Flynn