Nashville, 1982. The heat wave won't break. Neither will the truth—until someone forces it.
Jackson Trade has never been able to let a crooked story stand. So when Weldon Bennett, president of Nashville's biggest insurance company, walks into a West End bar and asks Trade to pull his son out of trouble, Trade takes the job, even though the trouble smells like more than a rich kid's bad decisions.
Turns out there is more. And it looks bad for the son. He’s interning at a flashy Printers Alley steakhouse and dating the daughter of the most dangerous woman in Nashville's shadow economy. Within days, the girl is dead and he’s in a cell, covered in her blood, charged with murder. The evidence is airtight.
Jackson follows the threads from Lower Broadway's honky-tonks to the polished offices of Metro Council, from a grieving bluegrass musician who can't speak to a political fixer who won't, from a woman protecting her empire to a man discovering his entire life was built on sand. What Jackson uncovers is a conspiracy that reaches into the bedrock of Nashville's power structure: a web of shell companies and buried secrets that someone will kill to keep quiet.
Steeped in the sweat and corruption of early-1980s Nashville, Suicide Trade features a protagonist whose refusal to look away might make him the last honest man in a city built on performance.
This is Hardboiled Southern. All. Day. Long.
Genre: Mystery
Jackson Trade has never been able to let a crooked story stand. So when Weldon Bennett, president of Nashville's biggest insurance company, walks into a West End bar and asks Trade to pull his son out of trouble, Trade takes the job, even though the trouble smells like more than a rich kid's bad decisions.
Turns out there is more. And it looks bad for the son. He’s interning at a flashy Printers Alley steakhouse and dating the daughter of the most dangerous woman in Nashville's shadow economy. Within days, the girl is dead and he’s in a cell, covered in her blood, charged with murder. The evidence is airtight.
Jackson follows the threads from Lower Broadway's honky-tonks to the polished offices of Metro Council, from a grieving bluegrass musician who can't speak to a political fixer who won't, from a woman protecting her empire to a man discovering his entire life was built on sand. What Jackson uncovers is a conspiracy that reaches into the bedrock of Nashville's power structure: a web of shell companies and buried secrets that someone will kill to keep quiet.
Steeped in the sweat and corruption of early-1980s Nashville, Suicide Trade features a protagonist whose refusal to look away might make him the last honest man in a city built on performance.
This is Hardboiled Southern. All. Day. Long.
Genre: Mystery