James Sallis
In steamy New Orleans, black private detective Lew Griffin has taken on a seemingly hopeless missing-person case. The trail takes him through the underbelly of the French Quarter with its bar girls, pimps, and tourist attractions....
2) Drive
Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there'd be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn's late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the
...3) Black Hornet
A sniper has fatally shot five people. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin is standing beside her. Though they are virtual strangers, it is left to Griffin to avenge her death, or at least to try and make some sense of it. His unlikely allies include a crusading...
4) Bluebottle
As Lew Griffin leaves a New Orleans music club with an older white woman he has just met, someone fires a shot and Lew goes down. When he comes to, he discovers that...
Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans—a teacher, a writer, and an ex-detective. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son—and himself in the process. Now a derelict has...
In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the bed is a body. Instead of speaking, he reflects on his life—his failing relationship, his missing son, the fact that he hasn’t written in years—and how the two of them...
7) Moth
One of the very few lights from Lew Griffin’s dark and violent past has flickered out. His one-time lover, LaVerne Adams, is dead—and her daughter, Alouette, has vanished into a seamy, dead-end world of users and abusers, leaving behind a critically fragile...
8) Salt River
The poignant and surprising new thriller by one of America's most acclaimed writers. Few American writers create more memorable landscapes-both natural and interior-than James Sallis. His highly praised Lew Griffin novels evoked classic New Orleans and the convoluted inner space of his black private detective. More recently—in Cypress Grove and Cripple Creek—he has conjured a small town somewhere near Memphis, where John Turner-ex-policeman,
...Over the past five years, James Sallis has created three of the most acclaimed mysteries published in America, each of them featuring the complex John Turner—former cop, therapist, and an ex-con, trying to escape his past, yet ever involved in the small community somewhere near Memphis where he has sought refuge. The Turner Trilogy—concise, elegiac, memorable—collects these three classics in one paperback volume. A trio of brilliant, linked
...10) Cripple Creek
As this tale opens, Turner, ex-cop, ex-con, and ex-psychotherapist, remains on the lam in rural Cypress Grove, Tennessee, escaping the demons of past lives in Memphis, but he is starting to mend. There's a developing relationship with Val Bjorn, teacher and country musician; there's the appearance of his daughter from Seattle; and there's the fact that he has come out of hibernation to accept the job as deputy sheriff of Cypress Grove. Then his
...12) Driven
"The perfect piece of noir fiction." —New York Times Book Review
"Terse, brutal, poetic, perfectly wrought." —Publishers Weekly STARRED review
At the end of Drive, Driver has killed Bernie Rose, "the only one he ever mourned," ending his campaign against those who double-crossed him. Driven tells how that young man, done with killing, becomes the one who goes down "at 3 a.m. on a clear,
...13) Willnot: a novel
14) Sarah Jane
15) Cypress Grove
As he has shown so often in previous novels, James Sallis is one of our great stylists and storytellers, whose deep interest in human nature is expressed in the powerful stories of men too often at odds with themselves as well as the world around them. His new novel, Cypress Grove, continues in that highly praised tradition. The small town where Turner has moved is one of America's lost places, halfway between Memphis and forever. That makes
...17) Drive
20) The Graveyard
When Marek Hłasko sent this novel to publishers in Poland in the mid-1950s, it was uniformly rejected. When he asked why, he was told: “This Poland doesn’t exist.”
Long out of print, The Graveyard is Hłasko’s portrait of a system built on such denial and willful blindness. Factory worker Franciszek Kowalski is on his way home one evening after drinking...