A sniper appears in 1960s New Orleans, a sun-baked city of Black Panthers and other separatists. Five people have been fatally shot. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin is standing beside her. He’s black and she’s white, and 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 black journalist, a longtime supplier of mercenary arms and troops, and bail bondsman Frankie DeNoux. Yet it is the character of Lew Griffin that takes center stage, as in each of Sallis’s highly praised books. He is by now, in this prequel, well on the way to becoming what he will be: violent, kind, contradictory, alcoholic. Both naïve and wise, he is a man cursed by unspeakable demons, yet seemingly encircled by redemptive angels awaiting an opening.

As Lew Griffin leaves a New Orleans music club with an older white woman he’s just met, someone fires a shot and Lew goes down. When he comes fully to, Griffin discovers that most of a year has gone by since that night. What happened? Who was the woman? Which of them was the target? Who was the sniper? There are too many pieces missing, too few facts, and a powerful need to know why a year has been stolen from his life.

Weaving Griffin’s search for identity—one of the recurring themes in this magnificent series—with a sensuous portrait of the people and places that define New Orleans, Sallis continues not only to unravel Griffin’s past but to map his future—and our own. Bluebottle continues the mysterious journey begun in The Long-Legged Fly and demonstrates the growing mastery of one of America’s finest crime fiction stylists.

James Sallis’ stories about ex-cop, ex-con, and ex-psychotherapist Turner have garnered starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly. Back working as a deputy in a small Tennessee town, Turner’s hands are full when the sheriff and the only other deputy are shot and the shooter escapes the county jail. Tracking the criminal to Memphis, Turner uncovers disturbing connections to organized crime.

James Sallis, author of the Lew Griffin detective stories, has been praised as one of Southern literature’s most original voices. In Cypress Grove, a murder with eerie connections to the past brings a man back to his calling. Turner was a homicide cop long ago, until he got mixed up in the wrong case and ended up behind bars himself. Now retired to a cabin in a small Southern town, Turner’s been recruited by the local Sheriff to help solve a bizarre and gruesome case.

David, as he’s currently known, was a member of an elite corps of spies trained during the coldest days of the Cold War. But those days are long gone, and for almost a decade he has been out of the rat race and working as a sculptor. Then a phone call in the middle of the night awakens him: the only other survivor from that elite corps has gone rogue–and they need David to stop him. What ensues is an existential cat-and-mouse game played out across the great board that is the American landscape and through the diners and motels that dot the terrain like green plastic houses on a Monopoly board.

In this haunting and visceral yarn, James Sallis investigates the cynical, violent, sophisticated world of modern espionage with authority and originality.

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 sound of someone weeping in the next room…

Thus begins Drive, the story of a man who works as a stunt driver by day and a getaway driver by night. He drives, that’s all—until he’s double-crossed. Powerful and stylistically brilliant, Drive has been hailed by critics as the “perfect piece of noir fiction” (New York Times Book Review) and an instant classic.

At the end of the initial novel, Drive, Driver has killed Bernie Rose, “the only one he mourned,” ending his campaign against those who double-crossed him. Driven tells how the young man, done with killing, later will become the one who goes down early one morning in a Tijuana bar.

Seven years have passed. Driver has left the old life, become Paul West, and founded a successful business back in Phoenix. Walking down the street one day, he and his fiancée are attacked by two men, and while Driver dispatches both, his fiancée is killed.

Sinking back into anonymity, aided by his friend, Felix, an ex-gang member and Desert Storm vet, Driver retreats but finds that his past stalks him and will not stop. He has to turn and face it.

Because he drives. That’s what he does.

Lew Griffin is a survivor, a Black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son–and himself in the process.

Now, a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lew’s novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men.

Somewhere in the underbelly of the Crescent City there are answers and more questions, there are threats and the promise of salvation, and there is a dangerous descent into the alcoholic haze that marked Griffin’s younger days, as well as the possibility of rising from it redeemed.

The mystery of Lew Griffin is revealed in this concluding novel of an honored series.

In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Griffin is alone. His relationship with Deborah is falling apart, his son, David, has disappeared again, and Lew is directionless—he hasn’t written anything in years, and he no longer teaches. Now he stands in a dark room, staring out the window. Behind him, on the bed, is a body. He thinks if he doesn’t speak, doesn’t think about what happened, somehow things will be all right.

In a story that is as much about identity as it is about crime, Sallis’ enthralling series about a black man moving through time in a white man’s world has held up the mirror to society and culture as it set Lew Griffin to the task of discovering who he is. This brilliant final volume will resonate in readers’ minds long after the story is finished.

Lew Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans’ Garden District, where he copes with his past by transforming it into fiction. But following the death of a close friend, he returns to the streets—not only the urban ones he has conquered but also those of the rural South that he escaped long ago—to search for the runaway daughter he didn’t know his friend had.

Griffin discovers that we rarely know anyone, even those closest to us. And he now finds that he must also face the two things he most fears: memories of his parents and his own relationship with his now-vanished son.

At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captor’s bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, at age sixteen she became a legal adult. Nowadays she works as a production editor for the local public TV station, and is one of the world’s good people. One evening she returns home to find a detective waiting for her. Though her records are sealed, he somehow knows her story. He asks if she can help with a young woman who, like her many years before, has been abducted and traumatized. Initially hesitant, Jenny decides to get involved, reviving buried memories and setting in motion an unexpected interchange with the president herself. As brilliantly spare and compact as are all of James Sallis’s novels, “Others of My Kind” stands apart for its female protagonist. Set in a near future of political turmoil, it is a story of how we overcome, how we shape ourselves by what happens to us, and of how the human spirit, whatever horrors it undergoes, will not be put down. *San Francisco Chronicle Biographical Note: James Sallis is the acclaimed author of more than two dozen volumes of fiction, poetry, translation, essays, and criticism, including the Lew Griffin series, “Drive” (made into the movie of the same name), “Cypress Grove,” “Cripple Creek, ” and “Salt River.” His biography of the great crime writer Chester Himes is an acknowledged classic. Sallis lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife, Karyn, and an enormous white cat. Review Quotes: “Sallis has always been the master of doing more with less, as he demonstrates once again with this startling experimental novel…The theme of working with ‘what you have left, ‘ a constant in Sallis’s world, permeates every sentence of this slim, insightful work.” -“Publishers Weekly” (starred review) “Surprising power: Jenny is an irresistible character, and there are flashes here of insight and sweetness.” -“Kirkus Reviews” “This will make you think about how–indeed, if–you interact with the world; how we construct our lives; how we heal from tragedy; how to carry on when nothing makes sense…this slim novel offers a wellspring for contemplation.” -“Booklist

Author James Sallis is acclaimed for his taut mysteries featuring world-weary ex-Memphis cop John Turner, including Cripple Creek. Assuming the role of deputy sheriff in a small town near the city, Turner investigates sordid cases in a community that time is slowly forgetting. Here his past catches up to him when his son rolls down Main Street riding in what appears to be a stolen car. “It’s a crime that a writer this good isn’t better known.”-Chicago Sun-Times

Shortlisted for the Anthony, Nebula, Edgar, Shamus, and Gold Dagger Awards, best-selling author James Sallis is a master of the gritty crime drama. The Killer Is Dying tracks the fortunes of three men of vastly different ages, backgrounds, and ambitions. Though they never meet, a hired killer on his last job, a burned out detective, and a young boy plagued by nightmares have their lives intersect in compelling ways in the scorching metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona.

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. As his search leads to one violent dead end and then another, Griffin is confronted with the prospect that his own life has come to resemble those of the people he is attempting to find.

Waking in a hospital after an alcoholic binge, Griffin finds another chance in a nurse who comes to love him, but again he reverts to his old life in the mean streets among the predators and their prey. When his son vanishes, Griffin searches back through the tangles and tatters of his life, knowing that he must solve his personal mysteries before he can venture after the whereabouts of others.

A brilliant new protagonist and his memorable community are introduced in the latest masterpiece by acclaimed novelist James Sallis.

In his celebrated career, James Sallis has created some of the most finely drawn protagonists in crime fiction, all of them thoughtful observers of the human condition: Lew Griffin, the black New Orleans private investigator; retired detective John Turner; the unnamed wheelman in Drive. Dr. Lamar Hale will now join the ranks of Sallis’ finest characters.

In the woods outside the town of Willnot, the remains of several people have suddenly been discovered, unnerving the community and unsettling Hale, the town’s all-purpose general practitioner, surgeon, and conscience. At the same time, Bobby Lowndes–a man being followed by the FBI–mysteriously reappears in his hometown at Hale’s door. Over the ensuing months, the daily dramas Hale faces as he tends to his town and to his partner, Richard, collide with the swerves and turns of life in Willnot. And when a gunshot aimed at Lowndes critically wounds Richard, Hale’s world is truly upended.

In his inimitable spare style, James Sallis conjures indelible characters and scenes that resonate long after they appear. “You live with someone year after year, you think you’ve heard all the stories,” Lamar observes, “but you never have.”