A spare, sparkling tour de force about one woman's journey to becoming a cop, by master of noir James Sallis, author of DriveSarah 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 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. This kaleidoscopic character study sparkles in every dark and bright detail—a virtuoso work by a master of both the noir and the tender aspects of human nature.

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 it a perfect hideaway: a place where a man can bury the past and escape the pain of human contact, where you are left alone unless you want company, where conversation only happens when there's something to say, where you can sit and watch an owl fly silently across the face of the moon. And where Turner hopes to forget that he has been a cop, a psychotherapist, and, always, an ex-con. There is no major crime to speak of until Sheriff Lonnie Bates arrives on Turner's porch with a bottle of Wild Turkey and a problem: The body of a...

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 of novels—with a sensuous portrait of the people and places the define New Orleans, Sallis continues not only to unravel Griffin's past but to map his future...and our own. Somewhere in the Crescent City—and in the white supremacist movement crawling through it—there's an answer to the questions left by the shot that echoed through the night. But to get it, Griffin is going to have to work with the only people offering help, people he knows he should avoid: allies if...