Sarah Jane by James Sallis

October 3, 2019

Sarah Jane by James Sallis

Sarah Jane Pullman (which may or may not be her name) was born in the area where Tennessee meets Alabama.  Her mother flitted in and out of her children’s lives, and although her father was hardworking, he couldn’t make a success of anything.  From an early age, Sarah roams from place to place, stopping when she runs out of money or meets someone interesting or just gets worn out, always hiding her secret history.  The chaos of her early life teaches her to travel light with regard to possessions and people.  Along the way, she serves in the army in a combat unit, earns a college degree, and becomes first a fry cook, then a baker, then a chef.  After her police officer boyfriend is killed in the line of duty, Sarah finds herself drawn to police work and becomes a deputy sheriff.  She is doing a good job, too, until the sheriff goes missing and she finds herself promoted to acting sheriff to investigate his disappearance.  But the deeper Sarah gets into the investigation, the more she realizes that the sheriff had secrets of his own that caught up with him, just as her own secrets find her.

Although we are aware that Sarah is telling her story selectively, deliberately omitting certain details, the reader is well into the novel before realizing exactly how unreliable a narrator Sarah is.  She chooses not to define many of her relationships and misadventures, even her relationship with Sid, one of the men who stays in her life longer than most men do.  Sarah is a true noir character, always short of money, taking whatever job comes along, choosing the wrong kind of man, and living according to her own code of ethics.

James Sallis writes wonderful, spare prose and does not waste words, the kind of writing that makes you stop and go back to re-read a loaded sentence.  Many thanks to the publisher, Soho Crime, and editor Juliet Graemes for providing me with a pre-publication ARC.