Rhode Island Red (Mask Noir) - Tapa blanda

This Grace Jones lookalike with a degree in French is a splendid creation (Sunday Telegraph)

Charlotte Carter has what impresses me more than just about anything in a crime writer: the practised discipline needed to craft functional, human sentences which flow one into the next without embellishment or posturing (Crime Time)

Rhode Island Red is elegiac and musical - especially if you prefer bebop to hip-hop. Nan is a wonderful character: a dreamer, head in the clouds, feet on the ceiling. Charlotte Carter has managed to be funky and dreamy at the same time (Liza Cody)

Nanette is doing OK playing her saxophone out on the street. Sure her boyfriend Walter doesn't think it?s any way for a black woman with a Masters degree in French to carry on, but she's happy. Then things start happening. An undercover cop dies in her apartment. A strange man wants her to explain the mystery of Charlie Parker. Walter wants to get married. And who or what is Rhode Island Red? Fast, sweet and funny, Rhode Island Red is a classic New York thriller, the story of a Spike Lee heroine in a Woody Allen world.