Excerpt from Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'This is real ... elaborate,' said Barrow. 'I mean, doing someone like this? Doing it up here?'

Drummond shrugged. 'Better see who it is. The why's usually in the who.'

'Yeah.'

Drummond held out the flashlight. 'You're turn, brother,' he said.

Barrow peeled back the layers of cloth around the corpse's head, sodden with blood and now stiffening. A white (formerly white) office shirt, not expensive, darned here and there; a dark blue suit coat, also cheap, also shiny with wear; last an overcoat in dark wool, the lining discoloured cotton not silk, one of the buttons not quite matching. Not a bum's wardrobe, but an outfit for respectability kept up on a tight budget. A clerk, not a tycoon. And when he pulled up the last heavy layer, that seemed to be who Barrow was looking at, though it took a while to get to an impression of what the living face had been, from the mask of gore that struck him first. The throat had been cut, deeply, gapingly, in a crescent-shaped gash from which all the life must surely have gushed out before the killer set to work on the man's chest. It made it hard to attend to the small, weak, upside-down middle-aged chin, just as the streams of blood that had run into the astonished mouth, and coated its fixed shriek, made it hard to notice the small teeth with many fillings and gaps, and the rivulets pouring down the face to pool in the eye-sockets disguised the careful shave, the anxious little eyes, the lines of fretfulness around them. Dead, it was lurid and terrible; alive, it must have been mild, petulant, inoffensive, a face it was hard to imagine someone taking enough exception to, to think its owner should be spectacularly butchered on a roof.

The way the body was draped, with the head tipped back further than it had ever done in life thanks to the slashed throat, kept the dead man's thinning hair and forehead more or less right underneath him, out of the blood flow, and it wasn't until Barrow crouched and played the torch down there that he found there was a word smeared on the forehead, written by the looks of it with a fingertip dipped in the mess above. Capitals. B-something.

'Phin, come look. Can you make that out?'

'What?'

'There. On his head.'

Drummond squatted next to him, hat pushed back for a better view. Barrow watched his comical blue eyes widen.

'I can get B–A–S – something. Maybe, "Basil" – like the name?'

'No,' said Drummond. 'Now, this is gonna be complicated; you'll see if it isn't. This is gonna be a can of trouble opening up right here.'

Excerpted from Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford. Copyright © 2024 by Francis Spufford. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.