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Cover of Black Cherry Blues by James Lee BurkeBlack Cherry Blues
Classic · Fiction, Mystery

Black Cherry Blues

by James Lee Burke
1989 · 321 pages · Fiction
Reserve shelf
≈ 8 hours to read · about 2 weeks at 30 minutes a day

By the numbers

69.5Must-Read Score
  • Readers59 out of 100 · counts 42%
  • Critics49 out of 100 · counts 34% (its stronger lane)
  • Bestseller0 out of 100 · counts 14%
  • Buzz0 out of 100 · counts 10%

Critics and Bestseller are two ways to earn a place: a book's stronger one counts more. Buzz rewards recent bestseller weeks and prizes, so older books start at zero. The parts combine into the Must-Read Score, shown on a scale where the best book we found scores 99 and the last book to make the ranking scores 50.

On our reserve shelf: it doesn't have enough readers yet for us to rank it alongside the Must-Read 50 pool. We check again every month, and it can still turn up in your 50 once you've read most of our ranked books.

Why it made the list

Won
Edgar Award winner (1990)

Reads as

Gripping

How we rank

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