Moth
A Lew Griffin Mystery

While the first book in James Sallis's Lew Griffin series, The Long-Legged Fly, was essentially a compilation of stories during different decades in Lew's life, the second, Moth, focuses on the time immediately following the events at the end of the 1990 section of that first book (literally picking......more

The Lew Griffin books are character driven stories which put depth and meaning ahead of the criminal element. In Moth, Griffin, less the private detective, more the acclaimed author and educator is pulled back into the seedy underworld of the lone wolf detective business when his former flame, Verne......more

James Sallis’s Lew Griffin books are enigmatic and move at their own peculiar logic. Sometimes poetic, sometimes willing to linger on an exquisite slice of slice, at points terrifying and existential(lots of disappearances and eerie phone calls), and always filled with literary references(Queneau, B......more

Dark and beautiful. While I can name a number of writers that bring a literary quality to the crime/mystery genres, Sallis is one of the only writers that comes to mind that writes literary hard-boiled stories. It takes a confident hand to reference Queneau in a hard-boiled crime novel, but to also i......more

Lew Griffin lives in a rich world of ideas and memories and haunts and searching. At the beginning of Moth, he’s mourning. But he might be always mourning. If not for a person, for the state of affairs all around him. He’s a former New Orleans detective soon to be on a case, of sorts. He’s a big-tim......more