YOU NEVER GET OUT OF THESE BLUES ALIVE.

James ‘Blue’ Moon, the greatest living bluesman, was ten years old when he saw Robert Johnson playing on a street corner. Now, more than seventy years later, he’s dying of cancer. His last wish is to reunite his estranged family — his soul-diva daughter Venetia Moon and his grandson, hip-hop mogul Calvin ‘Ice Blue’ Holland — for one final album. Enter his former protégé, hapless British blues-rock superstar Mick Hudson, who has unfinished business with all three of them, plus a posse of vengeful gangstaz and a mysterious figure with whom Blue struck a deal one dark, bloody night at a haunted crossroads back in his native Mississippi Delta. It’s a potent mix of secrets, nightmares and lies, spanning decades and continents. James ‘Blue’ Moon has one last chance to escape the hellhound on his trail … if the cancer doesn’t get him first.

Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award winner CHARLES SHAAR MURRAY has been appearing regularly in print for four decades, and has long been recognised as one of the most admired stylists in British pop-cultural journalism. He is “the rock critic’s rock critic” (Q magazine), a “front-line cultural warrior” and “original gunslinger” (Independent on Sunday). The first two decades of his journalism, criticism and vulgar abuse have been collected in Shots From The Hip. He is the internationally acclaimed author of Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix And Post-war Pop and Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century.

This is his first novel.

It’s a killer.

Says the author:

“The characters in this book are all Grand Archetypes, stitched together on a slab in my lab from bits of various real people, fragments of legend and rumour and plain ol’ ordinary making-stuff-up. I’ve never met a bluesman exactly like Blue, a soul diva exactly like Venetia, an elderly Brit rock god exactly like Mick or a rapper exactly like Calvin…

“I don’t believe, in any rational or literal sense, that there was anything supernatural about the life or death of Robert Johnson. The myth of the crossroads is just that: a myth… but it still provides a metaphor which won’t go…”