Dry, dark and spare. We see a hard-drinking detective Lew Griffin at three different points in his life, looking for someone. Each time, as he makes his way around New Orleans (every bit a character in these stories), I get a sense of loneliness and a dry sense of humour from this character.
James Sallis uses very little text to say a lot about Lew and the people he meets along his way in each of the three, tightly written short stories.

First book I’ve ever read where the tack-on preview for the next one in the series felt like an essential part of this book.

NOLA based, quite "literary" for a mystery. Sallis has written a critical biography of Chester Himes.

Odd form for a "novel" - 4 stories spanning about 25 years, all of them about missing people cases. Some close friends of the main character appear in all the stories, but that is the only connection between them.

I will read more by him (The Driver - being filmed currently), but a bit disappointed. The story is more about the life of private detective turned novelist, Lew Griffin, and there is very little action in the story.

Not a detective story, but an engrossing character study of a man who's a detective, writer, teacher, and translator as he finds missing persons...including himself.

Wow! This was a great novel. Look forward to reading Moth next and even more of his books.

Can't go wrong with reading whatever Jack Taylor is reading (Ken Bruen's The Killing of the Tinkers).

so inferior to chandler etc

I wanted a new author to try as an audiobook. Sallis had two things going for him - We have the whole series on talking book and at least the first one is short. Sometimes I get lost in long talking books because it takes me awhile to listen to them.

Lew Griffin, the protagonist, is a black man reviewing his life from the 60's through the 90's. This is not necessarily a good time to be African-American and it is definitely not a good time to be Lew Griffin. He is angry, frustrated and an alcoholic. He is also supposed to be finding several missing persons.

I can't really do justice to James Sallis' writing. The way he uses words, the knowledge he puts in Griffin's head, the way he turns a phrase all add up to more than the sum of these parts. I thought I was reading a simple mystery, but by the end I knew I had met a unique character. I don't want to give away the ending, but this book really startled me. I think I just stared at the road for five minutes thinking about the conclusion.

G. Valmont Thomas is the perfect reader for the book. I had not heard him read before and may be that is why I could accept him as Lew Griffin. I certainly hope he reads the rest of the series.

I recommend this book to those who like to discover lost treasures, to those who like being inside characters' brains, to folks who know New Orleans and to may be interested in unexpected plot twists.

This is an interesting, if slighly unexpected book.
Told by Lew Griffin, a sort of private eye/odd job man, alchoholic resident of New Orleans, this book covers a few of the key phase of Griffin's life/career, spread over several decades. Starting in the 60's, we jump 6, 16 and 10 years for the various 'acts'. His relationship with Verne is certainly unconventional, but then Griffin's always seems to be a bit uncomfortable in his own skin. Perhaps that is more to dealing with the persistant racism that pervades evocatively described New Orleans.
Not as good as Drive, but worth a read - I don't think I realised there were others in the series, so will be getting the next one to see how it moves along given the ending here.