Critically acclaimed novelist of works such as Death Will Have Your Eyes, Ghost Of a Flea, The Long-Legged Fly, and Eye Of The Cricket, James Sallis has created some amazing books. With his latest novella, Drive, expanded from a story in the anthology Measures Of Poison, Sallis doesn’t let his fans down with this semi-noir tour de force.

The excellently crafted thriller is fast-paced and as cool as one hundred and twenty pages can get, centering on a Hollywood movie stunt driver named Driver that moonlights as, of all things, a getaway driver. The opening chapter is scant but extremely effective.

Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Late still, of course, there’d be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn’s late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the sound of someone weeping in the next room.

The blood was coming from the woman, the one who called herself Blanche and claimed to be from New Orleans even when everything about her except the put-on accent screamed east Coast – Bensonhurst, maybe, or some other far reach of Brooklyn. Blanche’s shoulders lay across the bathroom door’s threshold. Not much of her head left there: he knew that.