A spare, sparkling tour de force about one woman's journey to becoming a cop, by master of noir James Sallis, author of Drive.

Sarah Jane Pullman is a good cop with a complicated past. From her smalltown chicken-farming roots through her runaway adolescence, courtordered Army stint, ill-advised marriage and years slinging scrambled eggs over greasy spoon griddles, Sarah Jane unfolds her life story, a parable about memory, atonement, and finding shape in chaos. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she finds herself 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.

In the tradition of James Crumley's The Last Good Kiss and Ivy Pochoda's Wonder Valley, this kaleidoscopic character study sparkles in every dark and bright detail a virtuoso work by amaster of both the noir and the tender aspects of human nature.

Praise for James Sallis

'Sallis creates vivid images in very few words and his taut, pared-down prose is distinctive and powerful. The result is a small masterpiece' Sunday Telegraph

'Crime novels seldom come as lean and mean...essential noir existentialism' Guardian

'The perfect piece of noir fiction' New York Times Book Review

'Sallis is a fastidious man, intelligent and widely read. There's nothing slapdash or merely strategic about his work ... peculiar and visionary' Iain Sinclair, London Review of Books