Moth

Having "come through the slaughter," Griffin has quit the detective business and withdrawn to the safety of his old home in New Orleans' Garden District, where he has learned to cope by transforming his experiences into fiction.

But now, spurred by a close friend's death, he must return to the streets - not only the urban ones he mastered, but also those of the rural South that he escaped long ago - to search for the runaway daughter he didn't know that his friend had. Griffin discovers that we rarely know anyone, even those closest to us. And now he finds that he must also face two things he most fears: memories of his parents and his own relationship with his now-vanished son.

Moth delivers magnificently on the promise of its predecessor. But where The Long-Legged Fly was stark and forbidding, Moth is expansive, bursting with marvelous scenes and unforgettable characters, filled at once with the matter-of-fact violence of daily life and with redeeming human compassion.