James Sallis

Best known for The Harlem Cycle, the series of crime stories featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, Chester Himes was a novelist and memoirist whose work was neglected and underappreciated in his native America during the 1950s and '60s, even as he was awarded France's most prestigious crime fiction prize. In this major biography, literary critic and fellow writer James Sallis examines the life of this "fascinating figure," combining...

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...

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....

Lew Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans' Garden District, where he copes with his past by transforming it into fiction.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 that his friend had. Griffin discovers that...

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 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...

"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 town conscience. At the same time, Bobby Lowndes--his military records disappeared, 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...

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...

John Turner, deputy sheriff of a small town near Memphis, confronts trouble in the persons of the sheriff's long-lost son, who arrives in what appears to be a stolen car, and old friend Eldon Brown, who is a suspect in a murder he does not know if he committed.

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, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, 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...

After being released from prison, a man seeking revenge for his brother's death sets out on a mission to kill everyone who double-crossed them, and he is tracked by a cop and a paid assassin; a hitman seeks revenge for the murder of his mentor and friend; a Hollywood stunt driver, who also works as a getaway driver, discovers a contract has been put out on him; when he is left for dead by a group of mobsters, thief Parker seeks revenge on those who...