city of the dead a claire dewitt mystery

She has brilliant deductive skills and is an ace at discovering evidence. Synopsis: Claire DeWitt is not your average private investigator. Published: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt June 2011 Although I also suspect that a Claire DeWitt on the straight and narrow wouldn’t be such a good detective, which makes for a tricky tension.Įnter your e-mail address to follow Shelf Love and receive notifications of new posts by e-mail.Title: Claire De Witt and the City of the Dead I do like the idea of one’s subconscious working things out based on actual evidence, and I think a lot of Claire’s approach is about accessing what the subconscious is uncovering, which is interesting.Ĭlaire herself is an extremely messy detective, with an extremely messy life, but that’s common in the genre, and I liked her enough to want to stick with her and hope that she figures some things out about her own life. It’s odd, and I’m not entirely sure what to make of it. It’s detection as a state of mind, almost a spiritual practice.

It’s not detection as a system of assembling evidence. Something she recalls in a drug-induced hallucination might be a clue. A sign she happens to see on a wall might be a clue. She talks about following the clues, but the clues aren’t necessarily straightforward pieces of evidence from a crime scene. What makes this novel by Sara Gran unique and interesting is Claire’s method. The story of the crime itself, and its resolution, is not especially original or surprising. As it typical in crime fiction, everyone involved has secrets, and attempting to unearth them puts Claire in danger. She forms reluctant partnerships (on both sides) with some of them, in part to gather clues about the community but in part to figure out how they’re connected to Willing’s disappearance. Looking for Willing brings Claire in contact with a lot of the young men who spend their days on the streets, getting in trouble and making trouble. (The drugs are also probably to escape her past, which is a topic that comes up again and again in the book.)Ĭlaire is in New Orleans, not long after Hurricane Katrina, to find out what happened to Vic Willing, one of the city’s district attorneys, who seems to have been missing since before the floods.

Claire does employ some of these traditional methods, but she also throws I Ching coins, consults her dreams, and uses drugs to get into a meditative state. She’s committed to the methods of Jacques Silette, the famous French detective whose book, Detection, offers musings about what it is to seek to solve a crime, not so much tips for questioning suspects or getting fingerprints. What a peculiar crime novel this is! I liked it, mostly because it kept me guessing, but a lot of my guessing was about the world of the novel, not so much the mystery.Ĭlaire DeWitt is a renowned detective who’s been solving crimes since she was a teenager in Brooklyn.

City of the dead a claire dewitt mystery