It’s May in Memphis, and four bloody murders occur on the eve of the International BBQ Contest and the Cotton Carnival: a conventioneer is stabbed at an ATM machine, a gang leader and his girlfriend are executed, and a wealthy local businessman is killed in his own home while his bodyguard is napping outside the door. It’s up to homicide detective J.W. Ragsdale to solve these seemingly unconnected crimes without scaring away the tourists who are arriving in droves. That’s not going to be easy. Ragsdale’s investigation pits him against a crack-dealing gang in the midst of a bloody drug war, a Memphis BBQ king struggling to hold on to his crumbling empire, a shotgun-wielding assassin, an East Coast mobster with a taste for BBQ and the blues, and the newly crowned Maid of Cotton, who will do anything to keep her tiara.
Memphis Ribs combines crime and enough dark humor to make readers guffaw and hope nobody heard them
Duff tells it with gusto and humor. And when it comes to describing the flavor of barbecue as well as the sights and sounds of a festival, Duff gives Calvin Trillin a run for his money. Duff's also got the local dialect and dialogue down cold.
Duff hits the jackpot...prose as laid back Southern as a hound dog napping under the porch. With J.W.'s wit keeping readers chuckling, Duff folds a vivid picture of the South into a solid well-plotted procedural. As sweet and satisfying as a barbecue dinner, without the fat
With his unerring ear for dialect, and his artful filleting of the Delta social order...Gerald Duff slow-roasts a tangy tale of murder, gang warfare, crack cocaine, and barbecue
Memphis Ribs has brutal killings, a street gang, a skydiving pig, a drug king wannabe and an amusing and interesting plot