Showing results for "James Sallis" in All Categories

Drive is 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.

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. Now, 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.

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.

Sarah Jane Pullman is a good cop with a complicated past. From her small-town chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, court-ordered Army stint, and ill-advised marriage, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in chaos. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she is named the de facto sheriff of a rural town, investigating the mysterious disappearance of the sheriff whose shoes she’s filling - and the even more mysterious realities of the life he was hiding from his own colleagues and closest friends.

James Sallis moves with ease among genres and modes: novels, stories, poetry, criticism, musicology, biography, translation. Best known perhaps as a crime writer—author of Drive and the six Lew Griffin novels along with others—his first acclaim came in the 1960s from groundbreaking short stories in science fiction publications like Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, for which he served for a time as editor, and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthologies.

The Laconian Empire has fallen, setting the 1,300 solar systems free from the rule of Winston Duarte. But the ancient enemy that killed the gate builders is awake, and the war against our universe has begun again.

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 by the realization that his own life has come to resemble those of the people he is attempting to find.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

After his experiences as a young naval officer in battles off Okinawa, Philip Bowman returns to America and finds a position as a book editor. It is a time when publishing is still largely a private affair - a scattered family of small houses here and in Europe - a time of gatherings in fabled apartments and conversations that continue long into the night. In this world of dinners, deals, and literary careers, Bowman finds he fits in perfectly. But despite his success, love eludes him.

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.

Vernon Rand is a charismatic figure whose great love - whose life, in fact - is climbing. He lives alone in California, where he combats the drudgery of a roofing job with the thrill of climbing in the nearby mountain ranges. Sure of only his talent and nerve, Rand decides to test himself in the French Alps, with their true mountaineering and famed, fearsome peaks. He soon learns that the most perilous moments are, for him, the moments when he feels truly alive.

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.

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.

In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Griffin is alone. His relationship with Deborah is falling apart; his son, David, had disappeared again. And Lew is directionless: he hasn't written anything in years, 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.