Began this immediately after completing 'Cypress Grove', first of Sallis' Turner trilogy and the language that I loved in that novel is also here; a poetic prose with a rhythm like the blues music that is Lew Griffin's one constant companion through the 30 years of his life told, in four episodes, in this novel. An easier read than 'Cypress Grove', the book takes Lew Griffin, a New Orleans PI, from the 1960s to the '90s, via four essentially missing persons cases. The cases themselves are not really the point; the character studies, the angry young man to down and out alcoholic to wiser middle-age are. There is a sadness, a fatalistic nature to the narrative, a melancholy that echoes the songs, by Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson and others, referenced at various points. At times reminiscent of Chandler, Burke, and, especially in the '60s and '70s sections, Mosley, James Sallis nonetheless has a voice of his own and I'll be back to listen to the blues very soon....