Lew Griffin

In steamy New Orleans, black private detective Lew Griffin has taken on a seemingly hopeless missing-person case. The trail takes him through the underbelly of the French Quarter with its bar girls, pimps, and tourist attractions. As his search leads to one violent dead end and then another, Griffin is confronted with the prospect that his own life has come to resemble those of the people he is attempting to find. Waking in a hospital after an alcoholic binge, Griffin finds another chance in a nurse who comes to love him, but again he reverts to his old life in the mean streets among the predators and their prey. When his son vanishes, Griffin searches back through the tangles and tatters of his life, knowing that he must solve his personal mysteries before he can venture after the whereabouts of others.

Lew Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans' Garden District, where he copes with his past by transforming it into fiction. But following the death of a close friend, he returns to the streets-not only the urban ones he has conquered but also those of the rural South that he escaped long ago-to search for the runaway daughter he didn't know his friend had. Griffin discovers that we rarely know anyone, even those closest to us. And he now finds that he must also face the two things he most fears: memories of his parents and his own relationship with his now-vanished son.

A sniper appears in 1960s New Orleans, a sunbaked city of Black Panthers and other separatists. Five people have been fatally shot. When the sixth victim is killed, Lew Griffin is standing beside her. He's black and she's white, and though they are virtual strangers, it is left to Griffin to avenge her death, or at least to try and make some sense of it. His unlikely allies include a crusading black journalist, a longtime supplier of mercenary arms and troops, and bail bondsman Frankie DeNoux. Yet it is the character of Lew Griffin that takes center stage, as in each of Sallis' highly praised books. He is by now, in this prequel, well on the way to becoming what he will be: violent, kind, contradictory, alcoholic. Both naïve and wise, he is a man cursed by unspeakable demons, yet seemingly encircled by redemptive angels awaiting an opening.

Lew Griffin is a survivor, a black man in New Orleans, a detective, a teacher, a writer. Having spent years finding others, he has lost his son-and himself in the process. Now, a derelict has appeared in a New Orleans hospital claiming to be Lewis Griffin and displaying a copy of one of Lew's novels. It is the beginning of a quest that will take Griffin into his own past while he tries to deal in the present with a search for three missing young men. Somewhere in the underbelly of the Crescent City there are answers and more questions, there are threats and the promise of salvation, and there is a dangerous descent into the alcoholic haze that marked Griffin's younger days, as well as the possibility of rising from it redeemed.

As Lew Griffin leaves a New Orleans music club with an older white woman he's just met, someone fires a shot and Lew goes down. When he comes fully to, Griffin discovers that most of a year has gone by since that night. What happened? Who was the woman? Which of them was the target? Who was the sniper? There are too many pieces missing, too few facts, and a powerful need to know why a year has been stolen from his life. Weaving Griffin's search for identity-one of the recurring themes in this magnificent series-with a sensuous portrait of the people and places that define New Orleans, Sallis continues not only to unravel Griffin's past but to map his future-and our own. Bluebottle continues the mysterious journey begun in The Long-Legged Fly and demonstrates the growing mastery of one of America's finest crime fiction stylists.

The mystery of Lew Griffin is revealed in this concluding novel of an honored series. In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Griffin is alone. His relationship with Deborah is falling apart, his son, David, has disappeared again, and Lew is directionless-he hasn't written anything in years, and he no longer teaches. Now he stands in a dark room, staring out the window. Behind him, on the bed, is a body. He thinks if he doesn't speak, doesn't think about what happened, somehow things will be all right. In a story that is as much about identity as it is about crime, Sallis' enthralling series about a black man moving through time in a white man's world has held up the mirror to society and culture as it set Lew Griffin to the task of discovering who he is. This brilliant final volume will resonate in readers' minds long after the story is finished.