Search results for ""Author Elsa Mathern""

'Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there'd be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn's late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the sound of someone weeping in the next room....' Thus begins Drive, a new novella by James Sallis. Set mostly in Arizona and L.A., the story is, according to Sallis, '...about a guy who does stunt driving for movies by day and drives for criminals at night.' In classic noir fashion, he is double-crossed and, though before he has never participated in the violence ("I drive. That's all."), he goes after the ones who doublecrossed and tried to kill him.

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At age eight, Jenny Rowan was abducted and kept for two years in a box beneath her captor's bed. Eventually she escaped and, after living for eighteen months on cast-offs at the local mall, was put into the child-care system. Suing for emancipation, at age sixteen she became a legal adult. Nowadays she works as a production editor for the local public TV station, and is one of the world's good people. One evening she returns home to find a detective waiting for her. Though her records are sealed, he somehow knows her story. He asks if she can help with a young woman who, like her many years before, has been abducted and traumatized.Initially hesitant, Jenny decides to get involved, reviving buried memories and setting in motion an unexpected interchange with the president herself. As brilliantly spare and compact as are all of James Sallis's novels, Others of My Kind stands apart for its female protagonist. Set in a near future of political turmoil, it is a story of how we overcome, how we shape ourselves by what happens to us, and of how the human spirit, whatever horrors it undergoes, will not be put down.

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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 centre 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 ploughing 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.

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