Sarah Jane

Starred review from August 26, 2019
Sarah Jane Pullman, the narrator of this hypnotic, meticulously crafted crime novel from Sallis (Drive), has become the acting sheriff of Farr, a rural southwestern town, following the disappearance of her predecessor and mentor, Sheriff Cal Phillips. Sarah’s combat experience in the Gulf War and her heightened perception of human nature have made her a natural for law enforcement, but her life up until this point has followed anything but a linear route. Amid her search for the missing Phillips, Sarah fills in her past. After fleeing from her small Southern town at 17, Sarah hit the road, and a bit of trouble led to her court-ordered stint in the military. After her discharge, Sarah spent years adrift, finding work as an itinerant cook in faceless diners and shelters, moving through a string of relationships (including one with a violent cop), getting a college degree, losing a child, improvising a life, moving on when things got complicated. An insightful character study of one woman’s reckoning with her own demons, this is also a powerful look at contemporary America. Sallis is writing at the top of his game. Agent: Vicky Bijur, Vicky Bijur Literary.

Starred review from October 1, 2019

Sarah Jane Pullman narrates her story, which starts with her growing up "from good hillbilly stock" in the South, then leaving home at 16 and falling in with a group of hippies, getting arrested and sentenced to jail or the army, choosing the latter, and serving in the Mideast. An explosion kills a friend and sends her home. She marries an abusive cop and leaves him. She lives with another cop, who is killed, then Sarah Jane's military service, tragedies, and life experience garner her a job in the sheriff's department of a small town, Farr. When her mentor disappears one night, Sarah Jane becomes acting sheriff and searches for the man she replaced. She uncovers glimpses of a man who admits he made mistakes when he came home with PTSD. Then her own past comes calling, in the forms of an FBI agent and a cop from New Mexico. Accidents and rumors dog Sarah Jane, who claims she never did all the things they claimed she did. VERDICT Sallis (Drive) 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.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2019
Like Willnot (2016), Sallis' previous novel, this quietly powerful blend of noir and character study finds both despair and great tenderness in the daily lives of ordinary people. "All stories are ghost stories," Sarah Jane Pullman, acting sheriff in the small town of Farr, somewhere in the Southwest, tells us, "about things lost, people, memories, home, passion, youth, about things struggling to be seen, to be accepted, by the living." As Sarah Jane makes her rounds?visiting the sick, sorting out the various petty crimes that plague the small town, and musing over the disappearance of her friend and mentor, the former sheriff?she circles around the edges of some of those ghost stories, professing to have little to offer the aggrieved but always delivering much more than she thinks. We also learn gradually about her own story, the people, the passion, and the things lost: an abuse-filled childhood, some traumatic experiences in the Gulf War, a stint as a cook in various diners, a lost child. There is crime here, too, and all variety of sadness, both in the past and in the present, but, as in Willnot, it comes in short bursts, forever coloring the dailiness of living but never quite subsuming it. Understanding that dailiness, the pain of it but also the flashes of connection with others, is the real subject of Sallis' work. "Words just won't hold it," Sarah Jane says of her own attempts to grasp the lives around her, but Sallis' words hold plenty.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)