Sarah Jane Pullman is a good cop with a complicated past. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she is named the de facto sheriff of a rural town, investigating the mysterious disappearance of the sheriff whose shoes she’s filling—and the even more mysterious realities of the life he was hiding from his own colleagues and closest friends.
...[a] remarkable new novel ... From the very first pages, the narrator moves quickly through events that would provide enough material for several novels ... Sallis is playing with expectations of the shape of conventional crime fiction, which this book both is and is not ... Sallis seems to be speaking simply, telling a story without much shape of its own, but his ability to evoke moments of everyday life ultimately delineates powerfully the experience of a woman who matters to us, in a life that, from her own point of view, she feels 'taking shape around me.' The final shape of her life is achieved gradually, step by step, in her encounters with people and events that are ordinary and extraordinary, placid and violent, particular and universal, disconnected and inextricably intertwined ... Sarah Jane, though, is an extraordinary novel about a woman’s sometimes violent and ultimately insightful encounter with ordinary life.
Sallis...has a quiet way of narrating a powerful story of accidents and death. The lyrical language and ambiguous ending is reminiscent of the best of Craig Johnson’s Longmire stories.
James Sallis writes neither long nor often but always wonderfully ... His new book, Sarah Jane makes mild demands of the reader but with great and haunting rewards.
