Synopses & Reviews
FM rock deejay and private investigator Rick Shannon is back in a big way in the second novel of a series that began with the rollicking
Radio Activity.
Highway 61 Resurfaced kicks off when a woman named Lollie Woolfolk sashays into the offices of Rockin' Vestigations and says she wants to find her long lost granddaddy, blues producer Tucker Woolfolk. Before it's over, Rick Shannon has crisscrossed the sweltering Mississippi Delta in search of the thread that connects a dead man in Yazoo City found with a fork stuck in his back to an old man known as Pigfoot Morgan who was just released from Mississippi State Penitentiary after serving fifty years for murder. Further complicating matters is the lovesick Crail Pitts, onetime Ole Miss football star who is driving around the Magnolia State with a noisy lawyer in his trunk, and Cuffie LeFleur, one of four generations of a cotton dynasty that may be on its last legs. In the end, everything points to one of the great mysteries in blues lore: whether Blind Buddy Cotton, Crippled Willie Jefferson, and Crazy Earl Tate ever recorded together. When Rick starts a rumor that he's found the tapes from the legendary Blind, Crippled, and Crazy sessions, a killer is sent to collect them and Rick starts singing the PI blues.
Review
"[F]or fans of Ace Atkins' Crossroad Blues (1998), also about the discovery of lost blues recordings, this one plays nicely." Booklist
Review
"[W]here [Fitzhugh] really shows his artistry is in his richly comic, warmly affectionate character studies of battered old men with long experience in living not just playing the blues." Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"Fitzhugh's dialogue is as cool as a pitcher of iced tea, and his characters are just over the top, like a Carl Hiaasen cast plucked from the Everglades..." Time Magazine
Review
"Bill Fitzhugh is a deeply disturbed individual who uses his warped talents to write very funny novels." Carl Hiaasen, bestselling author of Skinny Dip
Review
"Mississippi native Bill Fitzhugh has written some of the funniest mysteries on the shelves." New Orleans Times-Picayune
Review
"[A] pleasant trip crisscrossing the rural back roads of Mississippi, with some good music on the radio and a wheezing cat in the back seat. If this sounds at all like a trip you'd like to take, then by all means, go." BookReporter.com
Review
"[E]ndearing enough and eager to please, but it tends to lumber around a bit, and is never what you would call subtle or overly averse to knocking cups off of coffee tables....This is a hard book to dislike, and it's probably best not even to try." BookReporter.com
Synopsis
Funny, suspenseful, and full of rock 'n roll, this is the second tale in the hilarious mystery series featuring aging DJ turned PI Rick Shannon.
About the Author
Bill Fitzhugh is the author of seven novels. He still has all of his original organs and plans to keep it that way until the very end, at which point he is willing to let the doctors divvy them up among anyone (with the exception of politicians) who might need them. However, he makes no promises about the quality of his liver. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and all of her organs.