When Drumsticks begins, Nan is in the midst of what can only be described as a blue funk gone bad. Mourning the turn of events at the conclusion of Coq au Vin, she is "drinking suicidally." She is spiraling out of control when Julian, manager of the club where her best friend works as an exotic dancer, gives Nan a doll named "Mama Lou" which allegedly has "magic powers." Nan fortunes do change for the better in the form of a delayed check, big tips on the street and an offer to fill in at an Uptown jazz club.

Nan sets off to find her patron saint, Ida, the old street vendor who made the doll. The two hit it off well. Nan invites Ida to hear her play at the jazz club. When the woman killed, police dismiss her death as a random act of senseless violence. Nan is not convinced and the trail she follows leads to waring rap musicians and to her own father.

Nanette Hayes is perhaps the most eccentric of the dozen or so fictional Black female sleuths in the mystery genre. She is a mass of contradictions. Nan is one of the "Talented Tenth," a product of a Black middle-class. Her father is the principal of a prestigious New York private school. Nan has degrees in French and music from Wellesley, but prefers to make her living playing a beat-up tenor saxophone on the streets. Every now and then she picks up an occasional tutoring or translation job. She's an unabashed Francophile and jazz aficionada. Jazz riffs, bad relationships and a knack for finding trouble are part of her repertoire. It is the character’s quirkiness more than anything else that hooks readers.

In Nanette Hayes, Charlotte Carter has created yet another smart-talking, urbane African-American female character looking for love in all the wrong places. Nanette is at her best when playing off her parents, Justin, Aubrey and Sgt. Sweet -- characters reprised from earlier mysteries. Unlike the jazz expatriates in Coq au Vin, the new characters in Drumsticks bring little to the mix and it is difficult for the reader to get fully involved with them.

After a rather slow start, the mystery kicks into high gear with page-turning action near the middle. However, Carter is unable to sustain the pace and the remainder of the book runs out of steam and gets bogged down into a very murky resolution.

--Gwendolyn Osborne