Black Hornet

The third part of James Sallis' sequence of novels featuring Lew Griffin

In a time of anger, activism, and bitter racial tensions, a sniper has appeared to heat up an already sweltering New Orleans summer - by tearing up innocent people like paper targets. The shooter's sixth fatality is cut down while she is walking at Lew Griffin's side. The victim was white, Griffin is black - a reluctant young p.i. whose poet's heart has already been hardened by amoral injustice and heavy drink. And though he had only just met his unfortunate companion, Griffin knows it's up to him to find her killer - before a madman puts the final match to a volatile urban tinderbox.



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.



'James Sallis is doing some of the most interesting and provocative work in the field of private eye fiction. His New Orleans is richly atmospheric and darker than noir. Black Hornet is terrific'



'Wry... Powerful... A rich tapestry of social unrest and vividly evoked characters and settings... What Chester Himes did for Harlem... and Walter Mosley is now doing for Los Angeles, James Sallis is doing for New Orleans'



'Haunting... Black Hornet is fast-moving, elliptical, and like a jazz trumpet solo, has a plaintive note of melancholy woven through it'



'Sallis wants to harmonise detective fiction and 'literature' and succeeds so well that, like Walter Mosley, we scarcely even notice'



'A thoughtful, existential tale told in evocative prose'