Death of a Tenor Man

SIDEMAN BLUES

He played in Vegas. Then he died there--his body found at the edge of the desert with a broken neck and a bloodstream full of smack. Now, thirty-seven years later, Evan Horne is looking into the death of tenor sax player Wardell Gray, a sharp-dressing sideman who rubbed someone very wrong.

Moonlighting from his job playing piano at the Fashion Show Mall--his first gig since a debilitating hand injury--Horne was doing a favor for a scholar by asking questions about Wardell Gray. Then the heat, glitz, and payback of Vegas came down hard, bringing Horne up against a former dancer with a sizzling secret in her past, a mobster whose hobby is dollhouses, and the little-known history of a 1950s black jazz club--a disturbing truth that still has the power to swing, smoke, and kill....