-- Provided by Openair-Market Net.
The Maxwell Street Blues is the third in a five-book series by Chicago author Michael Raleigh, featuring private investigator Paul Whelan and a host of Chicago locations and street scenes.
The book is a mystery set against the backdrop of the old Maxwell Street Market. Here is an excerpt from the novel:
He began by making his way over to Fourteenth Street, where the Mexicans came on weekends to buy and sell produce and odds and ends...He walked through the crowd at a leisurely pace and took in the noises, the babble of Spanish and English, the smells of citrus fruits, onions, tomatoes, fresh or dried peppers -- every variety of peppers that grew on God's hot spicy planet -- plus chorizo, hot sauce eggs and tapes of mariachi bands and operatic tenors. A person could buy mangos here, and guavas, and avocados and even cactus, needles and all.
And there were cooking smells here as well, as though all of creation had come down to Maxwell Street looking for Paul Whelan...People were hawking other things as well, hammers and cheap toys, T-shirts and aluminum foil...He left the world of cheap oranges and homemade tortillas and walked east a block to Peoria.
The sellers here came in all colors: there were Arabs and Asiatics, whites and homegrown blacks, and they all wanted to sell him something...
Author Michael Raleigh is a lifelong Chicago native. He has received four Illinois Arts Council Grants for fiction. Currently, he teaches English at Truman College in Chicago.
The Maxwell Street Blues was published by St. Martin's Press. Copies can be purchased through all Barnes & Nobles or Borders Books and Music stores.