Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2019
216 pages
Genre: Mysteries
Publication Information
A spare, sparkling tour de force about one woman's journey to becoming a cop, by master of noir James Sallis, author of Drive.
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 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.
"A hypnotic, meticulously crafted crime novel...An insightful character study of one woman's reckoning with her own demons, this is also a powerful look at contemporary America. Sallis is writing at the top of his game." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Sallis is a sure hand—characters and prose, of course, dialogue, too, but he is also a subtle weaver of plot, with the perfect level of push. His descriptions evoke a place more real than mere realism could render, and his people speak and sweat and live and die and it's all a great pleasure." - Daniel Woodrell
"James Sallis is never to be missed—never. Everything he writes is most worthy and so beautifully written to boot you will marvel. He's a sorcerer with words. Because most of his novels feature a crime and subsequent matching atmosphere they are called mysteries but trust me these are novels first of the highest literary quality that work within the world of bad deeds gone even more wrong. Sarah Jane is no different. - Sheryl Cotleur, Copperfield's Books
This information about Sarah Jane was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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.
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