| Author Bio |
Laura Mazzuca Toops is a Chicago-area writer whose work has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times, Reader, and other local and national publications. An author of three successful novels - A Native's Guide to Chicago's Western Suburbs, The Latham Loop, and Slapstick, she also conducts workshops for fiction writers. |
In the summer of 1926, jazz lovers from the Midwest go where the weather is hot and the music hotter--the Blue Lantern club on Hudson Lake. A rural Indiana dance hall, the Blue Lantern's resident jazz band features a legendary young cornet player named Bix Beiderbecke.
For Bix, Hudson Lake is a safe but temporary harbor from a failed romance, conflicts with his middle-class Iowa family, and a growing dependency on alcohol.
For Joy, the fiery redheaded resident, Hudson Lake provides everything she needs–-a roof over her head, music she loves--and Bix.
For Harriet Braun, a young Indiana University student at the resort for the summer, Joy and the musicians are just another subject for study--until her involvement with Bix turns her safe world upside down.
And when outside influences like local bootleggers, a Chicago investor named Jack McGurn and even the Ku Klux Klan suddenly show up, jazz isn’t the only thing that’s hot at Hudson Lake. |
