Learning the Hard Way

The music industry can be a cutthroat business when it comes to recording contracts, shady promoters, and new talent desperate to make it big. It can also be murder. Ezra MacRae learns that the hard way in Streets of Nashville, the new crime thriller from poet, novelist, and songwriter Michael Amos Cody.

A dreamer from the small, rural North Carolina town of Runion, MacRae is on the verge of making a name for himself among hundreds of other music hopefuls after six years of pushing his songs in local honky-tonks and publishing houses.

When we meet him in 1989, he’s just landed a two-year, $15,000 per year guaranteed songwriting contract with independent music house Ave Canora, and he’s convinced bigger things are ahead.

“For years he’d been certain that the songwriting life in Music City was his calling,” Cody writes. “But the streets of Nashville hadn’t embraced him as he’d hoped they would, offering only occasional hinted promises to distract from the rejections.”

In a celebratory mood, MacRae spends the night relishing his good fortune at a local lounge. While walking home in the early hours of Easter morning on Music Row, MacRae suddenly finds himself witness to a violent shooting outside his publishing house that leaves three people dead and another injured by a stray bullet.

MacRae himself comes face to face with the shooter, who inexplicably spares his life and races away from the crime scene.

The next few hours under police interrogation at the scene and the next day alone at his humble apartment are a whirlwind of emotions for MacRae. “Why am I alive and sitting here,” he asks himself over and over. “Why am I alive?”

Cody effectively pulls readers into the narrative by taking time to show MacRae’s emotional trauma and never lets up. While later revisiting the crime scene, MacRae has a moving breakdown.

“He stood frozen in fear greater than he remembered feeling at that senseless, violent moment,” Cody writes. “Again, as in his dream on the morning after, everybody in the scene leveled a gun at him, and his vison blurred with a wash of tears.”

The author even goes so far as to get into the head of the killer, identified early on as disgruntled record producer Hugo Rodgers, with several chapters spotlighting the villain and his nefarious intentions.

It’s not long before Rodgers amps up the tension by calling and stalking MacRae about what he’s seen, putting the fledgling songwriter on edge. But as MacRae and the police work to identify the killer and bring him to justice, Rodgers is already on a mission to make things even worse — by threatening MacRae’s family back home in Runion.

A desperate race across state lines to warn his family follows, setting the stage for a final, gripping showdown in the rural hills of North Carolina.

Streets of Nashville unfolds at a quick, emotionally charged pace thanks to Cody’s terse, clean writing style. Occasional song lyrics are interspersed throughout the chapters to further establish the varied moods and faces of Music City, both good and bad.