Jazz Author’s Upcoming Book!

This December, jazz author Debbie Burke, who has written five books on jazz, will release a murder mystery about a Brooklyn-based saxophone player. The story is set in Brooklyn and post-Soviet Russia right before the war with Ukraine and involves the infamous “bone records” of the 1940s. [NOTE: Cover reveal and book title coming in November 2022.]

“Since stepping a toe into my Eastern European heritage in my 2021 book Klezmer for the Joyful Soul, I imagined a world where politics and forbidden music meet in Moscow,” says the Virginia Beach author. “After years of interviewing jazz musicians on my blog, I’ve been intensely inspired to write a book like this.”

Remembering her younger days of bike riding to Brighton Beach and Little Odessa, she revisits the landscape through the eyes of a middle-aged accordion player who, despite the 2016 election controversy between the US and Russia, treks to Moscow to see the bone records for herself. Along the way, she realizes there’s a connection to the recent death of a past-his-prime giant of jazz. Was it an accident . . . or a murder?  

Burke, who studied alto sax at the New School for Social Research in the 1980s, has written two jazz novels and three books of interviews of musicians and (as well as a book on klezmer and editing) has been an active blogger since 2016 at debbieburkeauthor.com. Her books are available at https://bit.ly/DebbieBurkeAmazon.