Lyrics of a Blackbird

Persia Walker
Publisher(s): Blood Vintage Press

Old loves, festering hatreds, and buried family secrets collide in this sweeping tale of Jazz Age New York.

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 from a prominent Strivers’ Row family, returns home to New York, devastated by the news of his sister’s suicide. Burdened by a secret of his own, he dares to stay in Harlem to seek answers about Lilian’s death.

He rediscovers the world of the Harlem Renaissance, a society of suffocating class strictures, seductive patrons, and aristocratic civil rights leaders. His inquiry takes him from the wealthy salons of its powerbrokers to the crowded tenements of its poor. He uncovers tragic family secrets, old loves and festering hatreds.

Each day he spends in town brings him closer to the truth—and closer to ruin. How soon before time runs out? How soon before his enemies find out what he’s been doing all these years? Before they uncover his own bitter and shameful secret—the sin that could destroy him?

This gripping 1920s murder mystery, taut and lyrical, combining elements of the suspense and hard-boiled genres, evokes the mystique of Harlem’s most fascinating era. Absorbing and powerful, Lyrics of a Blackbird combines incisive comment on race and class with a tragic tale of unrequited love.

A haunting standalone in Persia Walker’s world of Harlem noir, Lyrics of a Blackbird reads like the lovechild of Nella Larsen and Raymond Chandler—elegant, unflinching, and steeped in secrets. Where Larsen gives us survival through reinvention, Chandler gives us the cost of uncovering truth. Fans of Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, or Chester Himes will appreciate Walker’s sharp eye for power, pain, and the hidden costs of respectability.

(Originally titled Harlem Redux.)