Ghost of a Flea - A Lew Griffin novel

Publisher and industry reviews

UK Kirkus review

This is apparently the last book in the Lew Griffin series, which has taken a special place in crime literature by its arresting style and evocative New Orleans setting. Griffin's relationship with Deborah is failing and he is not in the best of health. When he suffers a minor stroke his friends rally round and he goes on dealing with cases as best he can. Some he solves, others seems to solve themselves. There's the mystery of the pigeons being poisoned in the park, a mystery which Lew tries to sort out because their gradual disappearance had made a small autistic child take to his bed in misery. And then there's his son, David, who has once again dropped out after leaving a message on Lew's computer in the middle of notes for a new novel which they both know will never be written. Anonymous, literary letters arrive to torment his friend Alouette and Lew means to get to the bottom of this one because Alouette is precious and, besides, literature is what he lives and breathes. He thinks and talks in quotations, seeing connections and parallels between his world and that of poets as disparate as Rimbaud and Walter de la Mare. And the style is gently beautiful. Sallis's depiction of New Orleans contains paragraphs which are themselves like loving poems; alleys are 'shoulder narrow', his own house is so empty he could 'hold it to his ear and hear the sea'. He misses no eccentric or comic detail, describing the way a down-and-out prepares his bed in the niche between an alley and a rich man's house, the glimpse of a waiter through a restaurant window, his arm gruesomely draped in bacon. The book is both a multi-layered mystery and the story of a man's thoughtful search for identity. (Kirkus UK)

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