Lew Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans’ Garden District, where he copes with his past by transforming it into fiction.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.
James Sallis (1944–2026) was an American author of crime novels, science fiction, biography, and poetry. He is best know for his novels featuring Lew Griffin, an African American amateur detective. He won the Bouchercon lifetime achieve award, the Hammett Award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière for The Killer is Dying. The film version of his novel Drive won the Best Director Award at the Cannes International Film Festival.
G. Valmont Thomas, a longtime member of the acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, has also been a faculty member at the Johnny Carson School of Film and Television at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His voice may also be heard in a number of video games and in advertisements for radio and television.