A spy is called out of retirement either to bait or to track -- and neutralize (to use a word Sallis does not) -- a former colleague who had been quiet for ten years until six months ago in James Sallis's "novel about spies," Death Will Have Your Eyes. David (that's his latest name) was trained as part of an elite group of spies during the Cold War, only three of which are "still undocumented (agency code meaning not dead)," and one of them seems to have become very busy.

Sallis doesn't write a genre spy novel. The spy elements are almost incidental to the real story that takes place inside David's head as he remembers details about his various pasts and ruminates on his current mission, his colleague-cum-nemesis, the lover that he had to leave abruptly, telling her to pack what she could carry and go, now.

David is on the road. He thinks, "The road gives us release, reaffirms the discontinuity of our lives, whispers to us that we are after all free, that (around this curve, when we reach the next town, if we can only make it to California) things will change." If you have ever given in to wanderlust, then maybe that sentence reverberates hard for you, too.

And then he notices that he is being followed. And the chase is on.

Sallis's philosophical undertone, his visceral intellect, resonates throughout his novels, and his narrative can often feel strangely personal. David observes about struggling to focus images from his memory: "Given paper and crayon, the ape draws, laboriously, precisely, only the bars of its cage, again and again." And I wonder... what is my cage?

Chapter 16, a memory about a woman David knew once upon a..., could stand alone as a short story.

The novel is a road trip, a cat-and-mouse game, a reminiscence, and it is written damned well.