Like all great detectives, Claire has strong anarchistic tendencies that work fine in corruption-ridden New Orleans. Audacious private investigator Claire DeWitt – a detective since she was a teen – is summoned back to the city she once called home, now filled with the smells of plaster dust and mould, to solve the case of a prominent district attorney who went missing during the storm. The kids and dealers are back on the street corners, and it’s business as usual. The setting is New Orleans one year after Hurricane Katrina.
Lucky thing I didn’t, because novelist Sara Gran’s first book of a new series is one of the most original I’ve read. The cover of Claire Dewitt and The City Of The Dead, with its blurb about a detective who uses prophetic dreams, mind-expanding drugs and the I Ching to solve mysteries, almost made me toss it onto my giveaway pile. As the adult Claire sorts through deadly puzzles, Silette is a key figure and resource.īy adding a comic-book teen detective and an elegant French investigator to the Claire DeWitt mystery mix, Gran turns "The Infinite Blacktop" into a thriller that is no ordinary, by-the-book crime procedural.CLAIRE DEWITT AND THE CITY OF THE DEAD by Sara Gran (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 273 pages. Adding to this element, the various crimes being probed are given names as if from a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys series, such as "The Clue of the Golden Butterfly" or "The Case of the Stolen Seashell."Ĭlaire is devoted to a French detective, Jacques Silette, who wrote a book, "Detection." For the teenage Claire, the book is a Rosetta Stone for solving mysteries.
It then moves back and forth among three different times, places and events: 1985-86 Brooklyn, when Claire is a teenager and a friend goes missing 1999 Los Angeles, when an art world death opens a door for her career and 2011 Oakland, when Claire is in the crosshairs of a killer.Ī comic book heroine, the fictional teen detective Cynthia Silverton, oddly becomes a key figure in the multilevel mystery that Claire is out to solve. "The Infinite Blacktop," Gran's third Claire DeWitt detective novel, opens in Oakland, California, in 2011 with a fast-paced round of crime-scene fright after an attempt on Claire's life.
0 kommentar(er)
