Bluebottle

No.5 in the Lew Griffin Series

As Lew Griffin leaves a New Orleans music club with an older white woman he has 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. Who was the woman? Which of them was the target? Who was the sniper? Somewhere in the Crescent City - and in the white supremacist movement crawling through it - there's an answer to the questions left by that shot that echoed through the night. But to get to it, Griffin is going to have to work with the only people offering help, people he knows he should avoid.



James Sallis has published sixteen novels, multiple collections of short stories, essays, and poems, books of musicology, a biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau's novel Saint Glinglin. He has written about books for the LA Times, New York Times, and Washington Post, and for some years served as a books columnist for the Boston Globe. He has received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Litterature policiere.



'Poetic, complex and multidimensional, James Sallis' crime novels about New Orleans detective Lew Griffin are unlike any you are likely to crack open'



'Sallis's voice is unique among mystery writers, and this novel, like previous ones in the series, is unforgettable'



'Richly atmospheric, haunting, utterly compelling, the Lew Griffin novels are really cool. James Sallis is an outstanding crime writer - an outstanding writer period'



'The New Orleans backdrop - gumbo, okra and the strains of jazz circa the 1960s - all add up to a rich gumbo of its own, nicely set off by the odd Lew Griffin and the quirky jumps in time'



'It is hard to think of another contemporary writer who has so brilliantly captured the shifting sand that is memory'