Ghost of a Flea (A Lew Griffin Mystery) - Softcover

Sallis, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802776817 ISBN 13: 9780802776815

Publisher: Walker Books, 2003

Synopsis

The mystery of Lew Griffin is revealed in the concluding novel of an honored series. In his old house in uptown New Orleans, Lew Griffin is alone...or almost. His relationship with Deborah is falling apart, his son, David, has disappeared again, leaving a note that sounds final. His friend Don Walsh, who is leaving the police department, is shot interrupting a robbery. And Lew is directionless: he hasn't written anything in years; he no longer teaches...there's nothing to fill his days. Even the attempt to discover the source of threatening letters to a friend leaves him feeling rootless and lost.

Through five previous novels, James Sallis has enthralled and challenged readers as he has told the story of Lew Griffin, private detective, teacher, writer, poet, and a black man moving through time in a white man's world. And now Lew Griffin stands alone in a dark room, looking out. Behind him on the bed is a body. Wind pecks at the window. Traffic sounds drift aimlessly in. He thinks if he doesn't speak, doesn't think about what happened, somehow things will be all right again. He thinks about his own life, about the other's, about how the two of them came to be here....

In a story as much about identity as it is about crime, Sallis has held a mirror up to society and culture, while at the same time setting Lew Griffin the task of discovering who he is. As the detective stands in that dark room, the answers begin to come clear and the highly acclaimed series builds to a brilliantly constructed climax that will resonate in readers' minds long after the story is finished.

About this title

About the Author:

A writer of varied talents, James Sallis is a published poet, critic, translator, and novelist. He has been praised as "a fine talent, introspective, sardonic, a master of quick characterization and narrative compression" (Buffalo News) and as "a rare find...a fine prose stylist with an interest in moral struggle and a gift for the lacerating evocation of loss" (Newsday).

From AudioFile:

The culmination of Sallis's six-part story of New Orleans private detective/novelist Lew Griffin explores areas of the human condition rarely examined in mysteries. Narrator G. Valmont Thomas affects a world-weary tone as he intones bits of poetry along with evocative descriptions of "The Crescent City." Novelist James Sallis creates a universe for his investigator in which loose strings are gathered but not always tied into a neat bow, and Thomas mirrors the whipsaw changes in tone, rhythm, time, point of view, and place, eventually producing an air of acquiescence and, at the moment of Griffin's passing, acceptance. R.O. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0802776817
• ISBN 13: 9780802776815
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 252