What Chester Himes did for Harlem when he began publishing in the late 1950s with Masque Noir, the famous detective imprint of the French publisher Gallimard, and Walter Mosley now does for Los Angeles, James Sallis is doing for New Orleans: appropriating the genre of the American detective novel and casting it with black characters in an authentic voice and setting . . . James Sallis writes in the tradition of Raymond Chandler, albeit via Albert Camus: a little plot and a lot of atmosphere and attitude . . . A good, wry, borderline cynical and yet deeply moral voice that carries the book with style . . . [A] rich tapestry of social unrest and vividly evoked characters and settings.