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Summary
Summary
Claire DeWitt is not your average private investigator. She has brilliant deductive skills and is an ace at discovering evidence. But Claire also uses her dreams, omens, and mind-expanding herbs to help her solve mysteries, and relies on Détection -- the only book published by the late, great, and mysterious French detective Jacques Silette.
The tattooed, pot-smoking Claire has just arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans, the city she's avoided since her mentor, Silette's student Constance Darling, was murdered there. Claire is investigating the disappearance of Vic Willing, a prosecutor known for winning convictions in a homicide- plagued city. Has an angry criminal enacted revenge on Vic? Or did he use the storm as a means to disappear? Claire follows the clues, finding old friends and making new enemies -- foremost among them Andray Fairview, a young gang member who just might hold the key to the mystery.
Littered with memories of Claire's years as a girl detective in 1980s Brooklyn, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is a knockout start to a bracingly original new series.
Author Notes
Sara Gran is the author of five critically acclaimed novels, including Come Closer, Dope, and the Claire DeWitt series. She also writes for film and TV and has published in the New York Times , the New Orleans Times-Picayune , and USA Today .
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Claire DeWitt can hack into police files, discover hidden evidence, and sort the innocent from the guilty because she's the best detective in the world. And the mix of drugs she samples helps boost her confidence as she scours New Orleans in search of Vic Willing, a district attorney gone missing during Hurricane Katrina. But mostly, this procedural is about Claire shooting off her mouth and her gun in rapid succession. Carol Monda perfectly renders Claire's sarcastic repartee and keeps this tightly paced narrative moving quickly. However, Monda struggles with accents, particularly the distinctive Cajun and Creole dialects of New Orleans. Nonetheless, she does produce a host of voices-some more distinct than others-for the book's many characters and provides narration that is both engaging and entertaining. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
If there isn't yet a subgenre called funky noir, this wacky PI novel could be a fragrant first. Gran's latest (his three previous crime novels are very different) stars marijuana-smoking, tattooed private eye Claire DeWitt, whose detective skills are aided by mind-expanding herbs, the I Ching, and a treatise on detection by Jacques Silette, whose work is presented, somewhat confusingly, as actual, when, apparently, it is fictional. Note that DeWitt has recently returned to post-Katrina New Orleans, and you may suspect a calculatedly trippy formula at work. Still, there's plenty going on. An assistant district attorney for the New Orleans prosecutor's office, who was widely feared and respected, has been missing since August 2005. DeWitt relies on her instincts and the I Ching to track the DA, all the while musing on life and New Orleans and delivering a no-nonsense, punch-to-the gut look at the post-Katrina city. DeWitt seems like a seventies hippie reanimated, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and the plot, while plenty roundabout, is lots of fun.--Fletcher, Conni. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
It's almost summer, so let's get serious about those vacation reading lists. On second thought, let's save the 600-page historical sagas and thickly plotted espionage thrillers for another day and kick back with something weird and wonderful - like a supernatural mystery. Michael Koryta, who previously staked out that territory with "So Cold the River" and "The Cypress House," takes it to loftier elevations with THE RIDGE (Little, Brown, $24.99), a freshly imagined and elegantly constructed variation on the dead-of-night ghost story. Set in an abandoned mining region in the foothills of rural Kentucky and drawing deeply on Koryta's affinity for spooky places, this eerie tale hinges on a chapter of local history forgotten by all but Wyatt French, an eccentric old coot who lives alone in a lighthouse he built in the woods to keep the dark away. "So if you got a light, hold it high for me/ I need it bad tonight, hold it high for me," goes a sad poem hanging over his bed. French becomes unhinged and commits suicide when a wildlife sanctuary for lions, tigers and other "massive, uneasy cats" moves into this remote area, intruding on his solitude and awakening nightmarish notions that something wicked is living up on Blade Ridge. But before he kills himself, the old man passes on his forebodings to two of Sawyer County's presumably more stable citizens, Chief Deputy Kevin Kimble, who is hopelessly in love with a woman currently doing time for killing her brutal husband (and taking a shot at Kevin), and Roy Darmus, who lost his job as the county's official storyteller when the regional newspaper shut down. Although their sleuthing efforts establish a realistic baseline for the novel's supernatural events, readers are swept along by Koryta's narrative voice, which is surprisingly soft and low and poetically insinuating, considering the horrors he's relating. The presence of the great cats threatens the spirits of the woods, which are "heavy with the feel of magic." And when a preternaturally powerful black cougar named Ira jumps the fence to take up the watch on these haunted hills, the scene is set for a battle that will either restore the balance of nature or plunge the whole region into darkness. Not to tip the ending of this extraordinarily imaginative story, but I'd put my money on Ira. Demonic possession, the provocative topic of Justin Evans's first novel, "A Good and Happy Child," takes on a literary twist and a sexual jolt in THE WHITE DEVIL (Harper, $24.99) when a wayward American teenager named Andrew Taylor is shipped off to Harrow, the elite English boarding school where Lord Byron sowed some of his wild oats. Evans starkly conveys the alienation felt by Andrew in this classbound foreign culture. Although far from a personable youth, Andrew finds his prospects brightening when his housemaster, a "drunk and useless" poet flailing away at a play commissioned by the school's governors, takes note of the boy's Byronic features and casts him in the role of that notoriously dissolute Harrovian. Evans heaps an assortment of gothic embellishments onto this coming-of-age narrative, probing the mystery of how Byron's sexual adventures at Harrow might have contributed to his literary maturation. The secret room with "the lustrous atmosphere of physical desire so overwhelming as to be sickening" is a bit over the top. But the pale, wan ghost who quotes poetry and takes possession of Andrew, showing him how Byron's romantic betrayal drove him to murder, offers about as much excitement as any 17-year-old might hope to experience during his senior year abroad. Guys' Night Out takes on a droll new meaning in THE PACK (Ace Books, $25.95), a glibly amusing fantasy in which Jason Starr invites wimpy men to reclaim their masculinity by turning into werewolves. Sweet, spineless Simon Burns is the ideal candidate for one of these hairy makeovers. Having lost his New York advertising job in a humiliating office coup and allowed his emasculating wife to railroad him into the role of stay-at-home dad, Simon falls right in with a group of cool fathers he meets in the playground at Battery Park. While not unduly alarmed to see one of his new pals eating a bloody steak with his bare hands, Simon is considerably more upset when he finds himself wandering naked in the New Jersey suburb where his ex-boss has just been murdered. "He had no survival skills," Starr writes of this urban animal turning on his literary spit. "He was a New Yorker, for God's sake." Like Jason Starr, Sara Gran made her bones writing urban noir, and she hasn't exactly given up the genre. The dead-eyed face of post-Katrina New Orleans that stares out from CLAIRE DEWITT AND THE CITY OF THE DEAD (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24) is every bit as raw as the battered mug she drew of 1950s Brooklyn in "Dope." But hope is on the way in the exotic person of Claire DeWitt, a supremely confident detective who reads the clues she finds in dreams, the I Ching and scraps of garbage that float up from the street. Called back to New Orleans, where she trained under an even more bizarre psychic sleuth, to find a beloved local character who disappeared in the aftermath of the hurricane, Claire prowls the darkest corners of the city, eyes wide open to the suffering and despair of its shell-shocked residents. Claire is a charmer, but there's nothing cute about her paranormal visions of a city living in torment. Michael Koryta's novel, set in an abandoned mining region, draws on his affinity for spooky places.
Kirkus Review
A Brooklyn private investigator who freely admits that she's the best in the world goes looking for a man swallowed up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.Actually, Claire DeWitt was trained by two detectives even better than her: her mentor Constance Darling, whose murder made Claire the best in the business, and Constance's ex-teacher and ex-lover Jacques Silette, whose cult reputation as the author of the classic manual Dtection didn't help recover his kidnapped daughter. Since Constance and Silette are both unavailable, it's no wonder that Leon Salvatore wants Claire to find his uncle, New Orleans ADA Vic Willing, two years after he vanished. What's remarkable is that he sticks with her as long as he does before firing her. Claire's approach to sleuthing is as Zen-like as Silette's. She declines to interview Vic's friends, the enemies Leon has helpfully listed, the police detectives who worked the case or even the street man who claims he saw Vic after the worst of the flooding. Instead, she promises, "I'm going to wait, and see what happens." What happens is that she tours the sad neighborhoods the storm struck; she hooks up with Andray Fairview and Terrell, a pair of street kids who've seen much too much for their own good; she runs into Claire's old friend, detective Jack Murray; she finds out a great deal about Vic Willing; and she tosses out bromides about detection. Through it all, every clue, every meeting, every dream keeps throwing Claire back into her own past, which turns out to be much more interesting than the present-day case.Gran (Dope, 2006, etc.) provides an adequate mystery, a comically self-important detective and a searing portrait of post-Katrina New Orleans.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Post-Katrina New Orleans holds so many secrets, and brash and confident PI Claire DeWitt is just the investigator to find a missing person. With gritty and dreamy elements, this fantastically framed noir piece might be the year's most original mystery. (LJ 5/1/11) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1it's my uncle," the man said on the phone. "He's lost. We lost him in the storm.""Lost?" I said. "You mean, he drowned?""No," the man said, distressed. " Lost. I mean, yeah, he probably drowned. Probably dead. I haven't heard from him or anything. I can't imagine how he could still be alive.""So what's the mystery?" I said.A crow flew overhead as we talked. I was in Northern California, near Santa Rosa. I sat at a picnic table by a clump of redwoods. A blue jay squawked nearby. Crows used to be bad omens, but now they were so common that it was hard to say.Omens change. Signs shifts. Nothing is permanent.That night I dreamed I was back in New Orleans. I hadn't been there in ten years. But now, in my dream, it was during the flood. I sat on a rooftop in the cool, dark night. Moonlight reflected off the water around me. It was quiet. Everyone was gone.Across the street a man sat on another rooftop in a straight-backed chair. The man flickered in and out of focus like an old piece of film, burned through in spots from light. He was fifty or sixty, white, pale, just on this side of short, with salt-and-pepper hair and bushy eyebrows. He wore a three-piece black suit with a high collar and a black tie. He scowled.The man looked at me sternly."If I told you the truth plainly," the man said, "you would not understand." His voice was scratchy and warped, like an old record. But I could still make out the tinge of a French accent. "If life gave you answers outright, they would be meaningless. Each detective must take her clues and solve her mysteries for herself. No one can solve your mystery for you; a book cannot tell you the way."Now I recognized the man; it was, of course, Jacques Silette, the great French detective. The words were from his one and only book, Détection. I looked around and in the black night I saw a light shimmering in the distance. As the light got closer I saw that it was a rowboat with a lantern attached to the bow.I thought it had come to rescue us. But it was empty."No one will save you," Silette said from his rooftop. "No one will come. You are alone in your search; no friend, no lover, no God from above will come to your aid. Your mysteries are yours alone."Silette faded in and out, flickering in the moonlight."All I can do is leave you clues," he said. "And hope that you will not only solve your mysteries, but choose carefully the clues you leave behind. Make your choices wisely, ma'moiselle. The mysteries you leave will last for lifetimes after you are gone."Remember: you are the only hope for those that come after you."I woke up coughing, spitting water out of my mouth.That morning I talked to my doctor about the dream. Then I called the man back. I took the case. Excerpted from Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead by Sara Gran All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
