Lyrics of a Blackbird
A 1920s Historical Mystery
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Lyrics of a Blackbird
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Narrated by:
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Virtual Voice
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By:
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Persia Walker
This title uses virtual voice narration
What does it cost to survive inside a system designed to break you?
Old loves, festering hatreds, and buried family secrets collide in this unsparing tale of Jazz Age New York—when a man returns from the dead, summoned home by a guilt he can’t ignore.
It is 1926, the heart of the Roaring Twenties, and Harlem is the place to be. Years after disappearing Down South to investigate a lynching, David McKay, a civil rights attorney from a prominent Strivers’ Row family, resurfaces in New York. His sister is dead—a brutal suicide, they say. But he's got another shock coming: she married a man she barely knew, an ambitious attorney. The man's settled into the McKay family townhouse—and he's not about to give it up.
David doesn’t believe his sister killed herself—doesn’t want to. But the alternative? That’s even uglier. Murder. The truth is out there, and he means to find it. But he’s got a problem—a secret that could bury him.
He reenters the world of the Harlem Renaissance—a society governed by suffocating rules; seductive, predatory patrons; and imperious civil rights leaders. His search carries him from the wealthy salons of Harlem’s elite to the crowded tenements of its embattled poor—and a heart-wrenching reunion with the woman he had to leave behind.
Each day he stays in town, each question he asks, brings him closer to ruin. People thought he was dead—murdered. Now those same people—people who matter—want to know where he was, what he's been up to. How long before they find out? Before they unearth his bitter secret—the sin that shames him, the lie that could destroy him?
A gripping historical murder mystery, Lyrics of a Blackbird confronts colorism, classism, and the corrosive cost of survival in 1920s New York, inside a system that pits a community against itself, that rewards pretense and fears truth. Perfect for fans of Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, and Chester Himes—with the psychological precision of Nella Larsen and the moral reckoning of Raymond Chandler.
(Originally titled Harlem Redux)