Salt River: A Novel (John Turner Series) - Hardcover

Sallis, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802716172 ISBN 13: 9780802716170

Publisher: Walker Books, 2007

Synopsis

The poignant and surprising new thriller by one of America's most acclaimed writers.

Few American writers create more memorable landscapes―both natural and interior―than James Sallis. His highly praised Lew Griffin novels evoked classic New Orleans and the convoluted inner space of his black private detective. More recently―in Cypress Grove and Cripple Creek―he has conjured a small town somewhere near Memphis, where John Turner―ex-policeman, ex-con, war veteran and former therapist―has come to escape his past. But the past proved inescapable; thrust into the role of Deputy Sheriff, Turner finds himself at the center of his new community, one that, like so many others, is drying up, disappearing before his eyes.

As Salt River begins, two years have passed since Turner's amour, Val Bjorn, was shot as they sat together on the porch of his cabin. Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left, Val had told him, a mantra for picking up the pieces around her death, not sure how much he or the town has left. Then the sheriff's long-lost son comes plowing down Main Street into City Hall in what appears to be a stolen car. And waiting at Turner's cabin is his good friend, Eldon Brown, Val's banjo on the back of his motorcycle so that it looks as though he has two heads. "They think I killed someone," he says. Turner asks: "Did you?" And Eldon responds: "I don't know." Haunted by his own ghosts, Turner nonetheless goes in search of a truth he's not sure he can live with.
James Sallis has been called by critics one of the best writers in America. "It's a crime that a writer this good isn't better known," wrote David Montgomery in the Chicago Tribune, while Marilyn Stasio in the New York Times Book Review called his Turner books "a superior series…a keeper." Salt River will take his reputation even higher and reach the wider audience he so richly deserves.

About this title

About the Author

James Sallis is the author of more than two dozen volumes of fiction, poetry, biography, translation, essays, and criticism, including the Lew Griffin sextet, Drive, Cypress Grove, and Cripple Creek. His biography of the great crime writer Chester Himes is an acknowledged classic. Sallis lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Reviews

Starred Review. At the start of Sallis's sublime third novel to feature the philosophical John Turner (after 2006's Cripple Creek), Turner, now the sheriff of a nameless rural community near Memphis, still grieves for his lover, Val, who was murdered two years earlier. His opening mantra—Sometimes you just have to see how much music you can make with what you have left—relates to not only Turner's melancholy mood but also the economically depressed area and its aging inhabitants. As Turner ponders the abstractions of life on a Main Street bench, a speeding car crashes through the front wall of city hall driven by the former sheriff's troubled son. The ensuing investigation leads Turner to some startling revelations about human nature as well as his own uncertain future. Sallis brilliantly uses flashbacks and tangential anecdotes, but it's the poetic prose (blackbirds and crows crowded together at water's edge, covens of diminutive priests) and the richly described rural Southern backdrop that make this slim book such a rewarding read. (Jan.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802716172
• ISBN 13: 9780802716170
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 146