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Ghost of a Flea

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
The mystery of Lew Griffin is revealed in the concluding novel of an honored series. In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin is alone...or almost. His relationship with Deborah is falling apart, his son, David, has disappeared again, leaving a note that sounds final. His friend Don Walsh, who is leaving the police department, is shot interrupting a robbery. And Lew is directionless: he hasn't written anything in years; he no longer teaches...there's nothing to fill his days. Even the attempt to discover the source of threatening letters to a friend leaves him feeling rootless and lost. Through five previous novels, James Sallis has enthralled and challenged readers as he has told the story of Lew Griffin, private detective, teacher, writer, poet, and a black man moving through time in a white man's world. And now Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the bed is a body. Wind pecks at the window. Traffic sounds drift aimlessly in. He thinks if he doesn't speak, doesn't think about what happened, somehow things will be all right again. He thinks about his own life, about the other's, about how the two of them came to be here.... In a story as much about identity as it is about crime, Sallis has held a mirror up to society and culture, while at the same time setting Lew Griffin the task of discovering who he is. As the detective stands in that dark room, the answers begin to come clear and the highly acclaimed series builds to a brilliantly constructed climax that will resonate in readers' minds long after the story is finished.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 12, 2001
      The enigmatic saga of the likable New Orleans private eye Lew Griffin draws to a satisfyingly convoluted closure in this sixth and final installment. Evoking a stark metaphysical landscape where time hovers on the verge of midnight and the sky is pregnant with rain, Sallis (Eye of the Cricket; Bluebottle; etc.) explores similar concerns over identity and the role of the detective as those found in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy. In what is sure to become an equally classic set of novels, he keeps it closer to the everyday with the very human exploits of Griffin and a detailed use of the streets and characters of the Delta City. But Sallis pushes the poetry of noir further than Auster and most other practitioners with such images as "another of society's makeshift facsimiles of dreams, rags and tatters of movies, media, popular literature, this new mythology, that my homeless soul had taken for its own and worn into the street." As Griffin faces his own mortality, his son is once again missing, and a cop friend is shot during a robbery; but these crime elements seem merely ornamental—the big action sequence actually centers on pigeon-killers. Readers who enjoy more average PI novels may find Sallis's highly allusive style a bit much, but fans of particularly sophisticated writing will love the experience of being drawn deeper and deeper into circles of narrative complexity. Agent, the Vicky Bijur Literary Agency. (Jan. 10)FYI:Sallis is also the author of
      Chester Himes: A Life (Forecasts, Jan. 8).

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