BACKWATER

A retired cop whose old friend asks him for help with a suspicious death steps into a fever dream of crimes, quests, memories, and mysteries beyond anything he’s imagined. This is the final novel by Sallis, who died in January.

One night Carson, the police chief of a small town called Anne’s Ferry, shows up at a faraway bar to hear Juice Daniels’ band, which includes his old pal and ex-colleague Bishop on guitar, and asks Bishop to help manage his tiny, mostly untried team as they look into a stolen car abandoned at a police station with a lot of blood inside. Agreeing, Bishop arrives in Anne’s Ferry to find that Carson has stepped out for undisclosed reasons, leaving behind a force now consisting entirely of Hollis, Raymond, and Felicia. Weeks pass. Bishop and company trace fingerprints from the car to military veteran Stanley Coogan, discover the battered body of Beau Nelson, best known for violently attacking his mother years ago, and try to figure out what happened. They meet with Ginnie Foult, whose brother has gone missing. They try to determine why Bull Prentiss suddenly collapsed in the middle of a service at Life Church. They join lay minister Ford Wallace’s search for his congregant and friend Grayson Mays. In the fullness of time, Bishop is appointed acting chief in Carson’s absence. Some of the riddles he’s posed have answers, some of them don’t. Although Bishop opines that “we use stories” to fit together the pieces of our lives, his six months in Anne’s Ferry play out less like a story than like a prose poem—or better yet, like a series of riffs on a jazz theme.

Sallis’ valedictory novel is his most poignant and elliptical, and that’s saying a bit.