What do you think?
Rate this book
Claire DeWitt Mysteries #2
Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway
When Paul Casablancas, Claire DeWitt’s ex-boyfriend and a popular musician in the Bay Area scene, is found dead in his apartment, his cherished guitars missing, the police are convinced it’s a simple robbery. But Claire knows that nothing is ever simple. With the help of her new assistant, Claude, Claire follows the clues, finding hints to Paul’s fate in her other cases - especially a long-ago missing girl in New York’s gritty East Village and a modern-day miniature-horse theft in Marin.
As visions of the past reveal the secrets of the present, Claire begins to understand the words of the enigmatic French detective Jacques Silette: "The detective won't know what he is capable of until he encounters a mystery that pierces his own heart." And love, in all its forms, is the greatest mystery of all - at least to the world’s greatest P.I.
With a heroine hailed as "a charmer" (New York Times Book Review), from an author who "reminds me why I fell in love with the genre" (Laura Lippman), this is an addictive new adventure for an irresistible detective.
©2013 Sara Gran (P)2013 HighBridge Company
As visions of the past reveal the secrets of the present, Claire begins to understand the words of the enigmatic French detective Jacques Silette: "The detective won't know what he is capable of until he encounters a mystery that pierces his own heart." And love, in all its forms, is the greatest mystery of all - at least to the world’s greatest P.I.
With a heroine hailed as "a charmer" (New York Times Book Review), from an author who "reminds me why I fell in love with the genre" (Laura Lippman), this is an addictive new adventure for an irresistible detective.
©2013 Sara Gran (P)2013 HighBridge Company
Audiobook
First published January 1, 2013
About the author
Sara Gran
17 books2,135 followersSara Gran's most recent book is LITTLE MYSTERIES, available from Dreamland Books on 2/11/25. She is the author of 7 1/2 previous novels, a screenwriter, and a publisher.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 669 reviews
December 31, 2012
“‘That’s wonderful,’ I said.
‘Do you really think so?’ Lydia said. ‘Do you really think it’s wonderful?’
Did I really think it was wonderful? Wonderful was probably an exaggeration. I thought it was fine. Maybe even good. I couldn’t say the last time I thought anything was exactly wonderful. This implied more joy than I may ever have felt. But that was what she wanted to hear.’”
***********************
Claire is a mess. A word of advice to those that allow her in their homes–keep your drugs locked up, as she’ll be in the medicine cabinet hunting for Valium and oxycodone as soon as your back is turned. You know Claire. I was friends with her in college. I’m not precisely sure if I love the character, or my memory of the Claire-like friend. Beautiful. Burning with intelligence. Supremely dysfunctional in an utterly honest way. Prone to exploiting and helping those around her in equal amounts. Not with maliciousness, mind you; more an instinctual focus on meeting her own needs, her desperate attempt to fill the holes in her psyche. And yet, despite all those dysfunctional behaviors, it’s heartache for friends to walk away. (Come to think of it, I’m in a Claire-like relationship with a certain book site right now).
Because I'm doing my best to limit dysfunctionality, I'll continue my review--as well as speculation about the author--at
http://clsiewert.wordpress.com/2013/0...
or
http://carols.booklikes.com/post/6797...
July 23, 2014
When her ex-boyfriend is murdered, Claire DeWitt goes on the case. But what does it have to do with the other case she's working on, The Case of the Missing Horses, or one from her past, The Case of the End of the World? And is there enough cocaine in the San Francisco area for Claire to find her ex-boyfriend's murderer?
This is the eighth book in my Kindle Unlimited Experiment. For the 30 day trial, I'm only reading books that are part of the program and keeping track what the total cost of the books would have been.
In the second book in the series, Claire DeWitt continues being the world's greatest detective. This time, Claire's mission is a much more personal one. As she digs through Paul Casablancas' past, she also confronts her own, when she and Tracy were looking for a missing girl in Brooklyn when they were teenagers.
As with the previous book, Claire uses unconventional methods like dreams, tarot cards, and copious amounts of cocaine to keep things going after she exhaust conventional methods. Who knew clues like a missing guitar and poker chips could snowball like they did. Once again, Claire proves she's the World's Greatest Detective.
She also proves she's just barely skating along the border of genius and insanity, getting more self-destructive as the case progresses with her cocaine and pain pills. The case from the past in Brooklyn gives us a glimpse of how Claire got to where she is today.
The second book leaves a lot of questions unanswered, paving the way for the third and final book. Who is the one leaving copies of Detection for people to find? How was it Claire and her friends were the only people to read the Cynthia Silverton books when they were kids? And who was it that cliffhangered Claire's ass at the end of this book?
The writing, as with the previous book, is superb. It reminds me of Megan Abbott and George Pelecanos writing a Nancy Drew mystery. I enjoyed this one slightly less than the first Claire DeWitt book but it was still a great read. 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Current Kindle Unlimited Savings Total: $48.10.
This is the eighth book in my Kindle Unlimited Experiment. For the 30 day trial, I'm only reading books that are part of the program and keeping track what the total cost of the books would have been.
In the second book in the series, Claire DeWitt continues being the world's greatest detective. This time, Claire's mission is a much more personal one. As she digs through Paul Casablancas' past, she also confronts her own, when she and Tracy were looking for a missing girl in Brooklyn when they were teenagers.
As with the previous book, Claire uses unconventional methods like dreams, tarot cards, and copious amounts of cocaine to keep things going after she exhaust conventional methods. Who knew clues like a missing guitar and poker chips could snowball like they did. Once again, Claire proves she's the World's Greatest Detective.
She also proves she's just barely skating along the border of genius and insanity, getting more self-destructive as the case progresses with her cocaine and pain pills. The case from the past in Brooklyn gives us a glimpse of how Claire got to where she is today.
The second book leaves a lot of questions unanswered, paving the way for the third and final book. Who is the one leaving copies of Detection for people to find? How was it Claire and her friends were the only people to read the Cynthia Silverton books when they were kids? And who was it that cliffhangered Claire's ass at the end of this book?
The writing, as with the previous book, is superb. It reminds me of Megan Abbott and George Pelecanos writing a Nancy Drew mystery. I enjoyed this one slightly less than the first Claire DeWitt book but it was still a great read. 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Current Kindle Unlimited Savings Total: $48.10.
February 4, 2022
My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. I’m avoiding police procedurals and standalone “women in peril'' thrillers to focus on ladies who are amateur sleuths. Published in 2013, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway is the second in a series featuring the self-proclaimed "world's greatest private eye," San Francisco's own Claire DeWitt. In spite of her cheekiness, Claire is not the Girl Next Door found in other mysteries, solving cases with the help of a cute guy, live-in nanny or a cat. She's more like Amy Winehouse communing with Sherlock Holmes while under psychiatric evaluation.
Picking up in January 2011, four years after The Case of the Green Parrot took her to New Orleans in the first book, Claire DeWitt is thirty-nine and as busy as ever. Her new assistant Claude is a PhD student at Berkeley whose knowledge of medieval economics comes in handier than expected. Like his employer, Claude has inexplicably become obsessed by detective work. Asleep at her place in San Francisco, Claire receives a phone call at five in the morning from a police detective notifying her of a murder. An ex-boyfriend named Paul Casablancas has been shot to death in his Mission District home and his wife Lydia Nunez is inconsolable.
Paul was a talented guitarist, much loved in the Bay Area. A heir to Casablanca Candy, he was also rich, but low key about his fortune and dismissive of Lydia signing any pre-nump when they married. Smart and physically attractive, Lydia is a well-regarded guitarist as well, formerly of a band called The Tearjerkers, later a group she formed with Paul called Bluebird and more recently a bluesy, roots-y, Harry Smith-inspired punk band called The Anthologies. While Claire downplays her relationship with Paul--who she immediately begins compartmentalizing as "the victim"--she resolves to look into his death.
Later I pieced together the whole story. Earlier that evening, at approximately six p.m., the victim had parked his car, a 1972 Ford Bronco , with two guitars, an amp, and a small suitcase, and headed toward Los Angeles. He had a small show booked at USC the next night. He'd planned to leave earlier and didn't; the victim was often late. Lydia hung around the house and went out at about ten p.m. to the Make-Out Room, a club on Twenty-Fourth Street, to see a band called Silent Film. At about midnight a neighbor heard what he thought was a shot and called the police. The police came. The body was found. Lydia came home and saw the scene. Everyone figured Paul's car had broken down somewhere and somehow he'd gotten a ride back home, but no one knew the exact sequence of events yet. But it made the most sense and I figured it was true. The police figured he'd surprised the thief, who had shot Paul to avoid getting caught.
That part I wasn't so sure about.
Claire is a disciple of Jacques Silette, a Parisian private investigator whose book Détection was published in 1959 and though out of print, Claire considers her Bible. She discovered Silette as a child growing up in Brooklyn, where her friend Tracy found a copy in the dumbwaiter of her parents' house. Claire and Tracy began solving mysteries in the fourth grade with another friend, Kelly, learning Silette's first rule: most people don't want their mysteries solved. As Silette would be stumped when it came to solving the disappearance of his own daughter, so too Claire has been haunted by the unsolved disappearance of Tracy from a subway station in 1987.
Claire is unable to make it through the morning, afternoon or evening without a bump of cocaine or any number of prescription amphetamines she nicks from the medicine cabinets of whoever's home she's visiting. When she doesn't want to be alone, Claire goes home with any number of men or women she picks up in bars, coffeeshops or knows through friends. The story flashes back often to Brooklyn of January 1986, when Claire and Tracy were hired by one of Tracy's friends to find Chloe Roman, an older girl who disappeared from her job as a filmmaker's assistant. Claire and Tracy designate this The Case of the End of the World.
Paul's sister Emily believes that he was murdered and that his wife Lydia shot him. Claire proceeds with what she's calling The Case of the Kali Yuga. (In Hindu mythology, the Kali Yuga was a stretch of time in which humanity strove for enlightenment, when chaos and confusion abound.) Paul's vehicle turns up in an impound yard, having been abandoned on the Bay Bridge with a dead alternator. Claire hopes that the stolen guitars will lead her to Paul's murderer. In the meantime, she goes to spend time with Lydia at the house the victim grew up in, up in Sonoma County on Bohemian Highway.
East Sonoma County is famous for its wine. West Sonoma County isn't famous at all. It's somewhat well known, though, for its fog, its redwoods, its wide and ever-flooding Russian River, and being the home of the Bohemian Grove, the large parcel of the county owned by the Bohemian Club. The Bohemian Club was an all-male club that started in San Francisco as a private club for artists and writers of the upper class and demimonde. Now its members included presidents, ex=presidents, and a litany of shadowy men like Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, men I knew I was supposed to think were important but didn't. They met at Bohemian Grove for two weeks every year, and no one knew exactly what they did there. Conspiracy theorists claimed the club drank blood and worshipped Satan, or at least had unauthorized discussions about the federal reserve and tax schedules. Defenders claimed it was just a fun outing of a very selective club. the Bohemians themselves weren't talking.
Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway has brilliance to spare, but like an investigation, the devil is in the details. Its atmosphere (1980s Brooklyn and present day San Francisco) is intimately detailed with the kinds of local knowledge not found in Fodor's; Sara Gran exhibits a cokehead's knowledge of the restrooms and nightclubs of both cities. She populates her story with musicians but without any of the pageantry or jokiness I often find writers assign to fictional musicians, based on what they've seen on TV. The plot is compelling enough--who shot the guitarist, stole his guitars and locked the door on their way out--but where Gran excels isn't in her songs but the spaces between songs, the ruminations between her plot developments.
That night, Tracy and I took the subway downtown to follow up on our last, best clue--the movie Chloe was supposed to see before she vanished. We took the G to the F to the East Village. New York City wasn't all that big for us--Brooklyn, parts of Queens, and Manhattan below Fourteenth Street.
It was less than ten miles from our house to Second Avenue: on the subway it took sixty-seven minutes to get downtown. I read the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest, checked out from the bookmobile that morning. Tracy had read it already. She picked up a copy of the New York Post that someone had left on the bench.
"Fucking Koch," she said. "Switch with me."
"No," I said.
Every month brought exactly one good thing, more regular than a period: a new Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest. We didn't have much of a library in our corner of Brooklyn--a pale-brick storefront that was perpetually closed for renovations--but we did have a bookmobile: a shining airstream-type trailer some do-gooder stocked with comic books, romance novels, detective stories, a few Sweet Valley High paperbacks, and the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest. The Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest was a five-by-seven magazine featuring the exploits of teen detective and junior college student Cynthia Silverton. Each issue featured a Cynthia Silverton story, a True Mystery Not Quite Solved, true-crime tales, and alluring advertising for home-study courses in private detection and fingerprinting and important detection tools. I already had the Cynthia Silverton Spy Camera, a tiny fourth-rate imitation Minox that fit in the palm of my hand, and the Cynthia Silverton fingerprinting kit, which had started us on the road to ruin.
This month's unsolved mystery was the Case of the Murdered Heiress. Lana Delfont was found murdered in her Park Avenue apartment. The door was locked from the inside. Who could have done it? And why didn't the killer steal her famous diamonds, but instead carefully arranged them on her body?
"The daughter did it," Tracy said.
"Yep," I said. "The earrings."
"Exactly," Tracy said. "No one but a daughter would put earrings on her mother like that."
I felt that the transition between 1980s Brooklyn and present day San Francisco was disruptive. Hooked by The Case of the Kali Yuga, I was thrown back in time to The Case of the End of the World, then forward when I got involved in that case. There's more "woo-woo" than I needed--too many gurus and dream sequences and times Claire divines key information from the mystic--but considering the locale, I think that fit. Sara Gran is as close to Raymond Chandler as I've found for Generation X, with latchkey kids growing up with the same culture I did. Gran doesn't settle for cute or nice, but like Chandler, knows how disliked and miserable any true detective would be while searching for the truth.
While reading, I imagined Elisabeth Moss as Claire DeWitt. She's been cast in one great television series after another (The West Wing, Mad Men, Top of the Lake, The Handmaid's Tale) and this material is in that class.
Picking up in January 2011, four years after The Case of the Green Parrot took her to New Orleans in the first book, Claire DeWitt is thirty-nine and as busy as ever. Her new assistant Claude is a PhD student at Berkeley whose knowledge of medieval economics comes in handier than expected. Like his employer, Claude has inexplicably become obsessed by detective work. Asleep at her place in San Francisco, Claire receives a phone call at five in the morning from a police detective notifying her of a murder. An ex-boyfriend named Paul Casablancas has been shot to death in his Mission District home and his wife Lydia Nunez is inconsolable.
Paul was a talented guitarist, much loved in the Bay Area. A heir to Casablanca Candy, he was also rich, but low key about his fortune and dismissive of Lydia signing any pre-nump when they married. Smart and physically attractive, Lydia is a well-regarded guitarist as well, formerly of a band called The Tearjerkers, later a group she formed with Paul called Bluebird and more recently a bluesy, roots-y, Harry Smith-inspired punk band called The Anthologies. While Claire downplays her relationship with Paul--who she immediately begins compartmentalizing as "the victim"--she resolves to look into his death.
Later I pieced together the whole story. Earlier that evening, at approximately six p.m., the victim had parked his car, a 1972 Ford Bronco , with two guitars, an amp, and a small suitcase, and headed toward Los Angeles. He had a small show booked at USC the next night. He'd planned to leave earlier and didn't; the victim was often late. Lydia hung around the house and went out at about ten p.m. to the Make-Out Room, a club on Twenty-Fourth Street, to see a band called Silent Film. At about midnight a neighbor heard what he thought was a shot and called the police. The police came. The body was found. Lydia came home and saw the scene. Everyone figured Paul's car had broken down somewhere and somehow he'd gotten a ride back home, but no one knew the exact sequence of events yet. But it made the most sense and I figured it was true. The police figured he'd surprised the thief, who had shot Paul to avoid getting caught.
That part I wasn't so sure about.
Claire is a disciple of Jacques Silette, a Parisian private investigator whose book Détection was published in 1959 and though out of print, Claire considers her Bible. She discovered Silette as a child growing up in Brooklyn, where her friend Tracy found a copy in the dumbwaiter of her parents' house. Claire and Tracy began solving mysteries in the fourth grade with another friend, Kelly, learning Silette's first rule: most people don't want their mysteries solved. As Silette would be stumped when it came to solving the disappearance of his own daughter, so too Claire has been haunted by the unsolved disappearance of Tracy from a subway station in 1987.
Claire is unable to make it through the morning, afternoon or evening without a bump of cocaine or any number of prescription amphetamines she nicks from the medicine cabinets of whoever's home she's visiting. When she doesn't want to be alone, Claire goes home with any number of men or women she picks up in bars, coffeeshops or knows through friends. The story flashes back often to Brooklyn of January 1986, when Claire and Tracy were hired by one of Tracy's friends to find Chloe Roman, an older girl who disappeared from her job as a filmmaker's assistant. Claire and Tracy designate this The Case of the End of the World.
Paul's sister Emily believes that he was murdered and that his wife Lydia shot him. Claire proceeds with what she's calling The Case of the Kali Yuga. (In Hindu mythology, the Kali Yuga was a stretch of time in which humanity strove for enlightenment, when chaos and confusion abound.) Paul's vehicle turns up in an impound yard, having been abandoned on the Bay Bridge with a dead alternator. Claire hopes that the stolen guitars will lead her to Paul's murderer. In the meantime, she goes to spend time with Lydia at the house the victim grew up in, up in Sonoma County on Bohemian Highway.
East Sonoma County is famous for its wine. West Sonoma County isn't famous at all. It's somewhat well known, though, for its fog, its redwoods, its wide and ever-flooding Russian River, and being the home of the Bohemian Grove, the large parcel of the county owned by the Bohemian Club. The Bohemian Club was an all-male club that started in San Francisco as a private club for artists and writers of the upper class and demimonde. Now its members included presidents, ex=presidents, and a litany of shadowy men like Henry Kissinger and Alan Greenspan, men I knew I was supposed to think were important but didn't. They met at Bohemian Grove for two weeks every year, and no one knew exactly what they did there. Conspiracy theorists claimed the club drank blood and worshipped Satan, or at least had unauthorized discussions about the federal reserve and tax schedules. Defenders claimed it was just a fun outing of a very selective club. the Bohemians themselves weren't talking.
Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway has brilliance to spare, but like an investigation, the devil is in the details. Its atmosphere (1980s Brooklyn and present day San Francisco) is intimately detailed with the kinds of local knowledge not found in Fodor's; Sara Gran exhibits a cokehead's knowledge of the restrooms and nightclubs of both cities. She populates her story with musicians but without any of the pageantry or jokiness I often find writers assign to fictional musicians, based on what they've seen on TV. The plot is compelling enough--who shot the guitarist, stole his guitars and locked the door on their way out--but where Gran excels isn't in her songs but the spaces between songs, the ruminations between her plot developments.
That night, Tracy and I took the subway downtown to follow up on our last, best clue--the movie Chloe was supposed to see before she vanished. We took the G to the F to the East Village. New York City wasn't all that big for us--Brooklyn, parts of Queens, and Manhattan below Fourteenth Street.
It was less than ten miles from our house to Second Avenue: on the subway it took sixty-seven minutes to get downtown. I read the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest, checked out from the bookmobile that morning. Tracy had read it already. She picked up a copy of the New York Post that someone had left on the bench.
"Fucking Koch," she said. "Switch with me."
"No," I said.
Every month brought exactly one good thing, more regular than a period: a new Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest. We didn't have much of a library in our corner of Brooklyn--a pale-brick storefront that was perpetually closed for renovations--but we did have a bookmobile: a shining airstream-type trailer some do-gooder stocked with comic books, romance novels, detective stories, a few Sweet Valley High paperbacks, and the Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest. The Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest was a five-by-seven magazine featuring the exploits of teen detective and junior college student Cynthia Silverton. Each issue featured a Cynthia Silverton story, a True Mystery Not Quite Solved, true-crime tales, and alluring advertising for home-study courses in private detection and fingerprinting and important detection tools. I already had the Cynthia Silverton Spy Camera, a tiny fourth-rate imitation Minox that fit in the palm of my hand, and the Cynthia Silverton fingerprinting kit, which had started us on the road to ruin.
This month's unsolved mystery was the Case of the Murdered Heiress. Lana Delfont was found murdered in her Park Avenue apartment. The door was locked from the inside. Who could have done it? And why didn't the killer steal her famous diamonds, but instead carefully arranged them on her body?
"The daughter did it," Tracy said.
"Yep," I said. "The earrings."
"Exactly," Tracy said. "No one but a daughter would put earrings on her mother like that."
I felt that the transition between 1980s Brooklyn and present day San Francisco was disruptive. Hooked by The Case of the Kali Yuga, I was thrown back in time to The Case of the End of the World, then forward when I got involved in that case. There's more "woo-woo" than I needed--too many gurus and dream sequences and times Claire divines key information from the mystic--but considering the locale, I think that fit. Sara Gran is as close to Raymond Chandler as I've found for Generation X, with latchkey kids growing up with the same culture I did. Gran doesn't settle for cute or nice, but like Chandler, knows how disliked and miserable any true detective would be while searching for the truth.
While reading, I imagined Elisabeth Moss as Claire DeWitt. She's been cast in one great television series after another (The West Wing, Mad Men, Top of the Lake, The Handmaid's Tale) and this material is in that class.
December 14, 2013
I was a big fan of Sara Gran's first novel featuring Claire DeWitt, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, which was set in post-Katrina New Orleans. To say that Claire is an unconventional detective would be the height of understatement, and the character was fresh, quirky and very intriguing. Additionally, Gran did an excellent job of portraying the city in the wake of the disaster, and she was particularly good at capturing the lives of the city's young, poverty-stricken African-American males, many of whom have no real prospects and very little hope.
For those who haven't yet encountered Claire, she's a disciple of the French detective, Jacques Silette, author of the book Detection, which changed Claire's life when she discovered the book as a young teenager. Claire later did her apprenticeship in New Orleans under the tutelage of Silette's most outstanding protégé, Constance Darling, and when Constance died, Claire advanced to the position of World's Greatest Detective.
Claire is heavily tattooed; she drinks and takes drugs to excess, as often as not stealing the drugs from the medicine cabinets of unsuspecting friends. To solve her mysteries, she relies on mysticism and dreams as much as on more traditional methods of investigation.
This case begins when a musician named Paul Casablancas is murdered in what appears to be a burglary gone wrong. His home has been invaded; several guitars are missing, and the police are ready to write off the murder as incidental to the burglary that Casablancas apparently interrupted. But Claire has a personal tie to the case; she and Paul were once lovers, and when Paul's widow asks Claire for help, Claire assumes the responsibility of attempting to determine what really happened.
Claire investigates for the next several months with the aid of her new assistant, Claude, a graduate school dropout. In and around the investigation, Claire ruminates on the disappearance years earlier of one of her best friends, a girl named Tracy. As teenagers, Claire, Tracy and a girl named Kelly were inseparable. They discovered Silette's book, Detection together and began investigating mysteries of their own. Then, shortly after they solved a particularly difficult case, Tracy simply disappeared and neither Claire nor Kelly ever heard from her again. Tracy's disappearance was a critical element in the first Claire DeWitt novel and we now get the backstory that fills in many of the blanks.
As the above will doubtless suggest, we're not in Cabot Cove anymore, Toto, and this is not your grandmother's traditional mystery novel. It may not appeal to every fan of crime fiction, but it will certainly intrigue those who are willing to take a chance on a story and a character who are more than a little bit out of the mainstream.
If I have a concern about this book, it would be simply that it suffers a bit by comparison to the first in the series. Claire no longer seems quite as fresh as she did in her first adventure, although this is probably to be expected. More than that, Gran did such a magnificent job with the setting of the first book, that this one inevitably suffers a bit by comparison. The disaster suffered by New Orleans allowed Gran a canvas to work with that simply doesn't exist in San Francisco, although it's a great city in its own right. It also struck me that the supporting cast here is not as interesting and well-drawn as the one in City of the Dead, but these are relatively minor complaints, and I'm looking forward to the third and apparently final installment of the Claire DeWitt trilogy.
For those who haven't yet encountered Claire, she's a disciple of the French detective, Jacques Silette, author of the book Detection, which changed Claire's life when she discovered the book as a young teenager. Claire later did her apprenticeship in New Orleans under the tutelage of Silette's most outstanding protégé, Constance Darling, and when Constance died, Claire advanced to the position of World's Greatest Detective.
Claire is heavily tattooed; she drinks and takes drugs to excess, as often as not stealing the drugs from the medicine cabinets of unsuspecting friends. To solve her mysteries, she relies on mysticism and dreams as much as on more traditional methods of investigation.
This case begins when a musician named Paul Casablancas is murdered in what appears to be a burglary gone wrong. His home has been invaded; several guitars are missing, and the police are ready to write off the murder as incidental to the burglary that Casablancas apparently interrupted. But Claire has a personal tie to the case; she and Paul were once lovers, and when Paul's widow asks Claire for help, Claire assumes the responsibility of attempting to determine what really happened.
Claire investigates for the next several months with the aid of her new assistant, Claude, a graduate school dropout. In and around the investigation, Claire ruminates on the disappearance years earlier of one of her best friends, a girl named Tracy. As teenagers, Claire, Tracy and a girl named Kelly were inseparable. They discovered Silette's book, Detection together and began investigating mysteries of their own. Then, shortly after they solved a particularly difficult case, Tracy simply disappeared and neither Claire nor Kelly ever heard from her again. Tracy's disappearance was a critical element in the first Claire DeWitt novel and we now get the backstory that fills in many of the blanks.
As the above will doubtless suggest, we're not in Cabot Cove anymore, Toto, and this is not your grandmother's traditional mystery novel. It may not appeal to every fan of crime fiction, but it will certainly intrigue those who are willing to take a chance on a story and a character who are more than a little bit out of the mainstream.
If I have a concern about this book, it would be simply that it suffers a bit by comparison to the first in the series. Claire no longer seems quite as fresh as she did in her first adventure, although this is probably to be expected. More than that, Gran did such a magnificent job with the setting of the first book, that this one inevitably suffers a bit by comparison. The disaster suffered by New Orleans allowed Gran a canvas to work with that simply doesn't exist in San Francisco, although it's a great city in its own right. It also struck me that the supporting cast here is not as interesting and well-drawn as the one in City of the Dead, but these are relatively minor complaints, and I'm looking forward to the third and apparently final installment of the Claire DeWitt trilogy.
September 1, 2018
A smart, funny, flawed detective working around the rules. I liked the first one a bit more and plan on reading the next one.
November 8, 2020
So. I came by Gran's brilliant Claire DeWitt trilogy in an inverted way, beginning with the last book, The Infinite Blacktop, when it was published to much acclaim in late 2018. Although that is definitely not the ideal way to read this series, something - maybe Claire's own preference for approaching things indirectly permeated the pages - and I connected with her even without knowing what happened in New Orleans or San Francisco.
Claire's struggles to come to terms with love and commitment and loss and the unreliable quality of so many relationships form the core of the book. Indiscriminate self-medication with drugs is her coping mechanism. As in the other books, she selects the cases she investigates based on her personal feelings toward the victims or the suspects or both, and her methods of investigation based on the teachings of French detective/author Jacques Silette and her own mentor Constance Darling.
Readers' reactions to this series vary widely even among those who rate it highly. I can be counted among those who are disinclined to find fault. In fact, Gran's creation of Claire, along with her imaginative side plots and characters, are quite extraordinary. Something about Claire touches me. Her efforts to understand and adapt to the arc of her life remind me of extended periods of confusion in my own life. Not on the level of parallel experiences, but in terms of emotional vulnerability and lack of answers.
The books are eminently quotable. Here's one of my favorites: "There are never any sides, only things we understand, and things we have chosen to pretend we don't understand. Only those we admit we love, and those we pretend we don't recognize."
I'm so glad I decided to read this during the Week of The Endless Vote Counts. It was an ideal alternate focus for my attention. I will probably re-read The Infinite Blacktop before long, since it would probably make more sense read in sequence.
Claire's struggles to come to terms with love and commitment and loss and the unreliable quality of so many relationships form the core of the book. Indiscriminate self-medication with drugs is her coping mechanism. As in the other books, she selects the cases she investigates based on her personal feelings toward the victims or the suspects or both, and her methods of investigation based on the teachings of French detective/author Jacques Silette and her own mentor Constance Darling.
Readers' reactions to this series vary widely even among those who rate it highly. I can be counted among those who are disinclined to find fault. In fact, Gran's creation of Claire, along with her imaginative side plots and characters, are quite extraordinary. Something about Claire touches me. Her efforts to understand and adapt to the arc of her life remind me of extended periods of confusion in my own life. Not on the level of parallel experiences, but in terms of emotional vulnerability and lack of answers.
The books are eminently quotable. Here's one of my favorites: "There are never any sides, only things we understand, and things we have chosen to pretend we don't understand. Only those we admit we love, and those we pretend we don't recognize."
I'm so glad I decided to read this during the Week of The Endless Vote Counts. It was an ideal alternate focus for my attention. I will probably re-read The Infinite Blacktop before long, since it would probably make more sense read in sequence.
December 4, 2021
3.5 Stars rounded up
It's not necessary to have read the first book in this series to understand this story. However, you will appreciate it a lot more if you have.
This book got off to a slow start for me. Then once I was engaged, it held me in its grip until the end.
Gran uses the dual timeline strategy to reveal more of Claire's past. She returns to 1986 Brooklyn with a case that she and her friend Tracy solve as teens. More of Claire's backstory is revealed and I understand more of the big hole in Claire's psyche. She pairs this with current 2011 San Francisco as Claire investigates the murder of an ex-boyfriend.
The Bohemian Highway is grittier than The City of the Dead. Claire is sliding deeper into drug addiction as she self-medicates to protect herself from pain. There is less humor, and the humor is darker. For example, as Claire and her assistant investigate some missing miniature horses:
“My theory was that the little fellows were running away to try to get some big boy genes back in the mix, or maybe committing suicide. I made a mental note to research equine suicides.”
The social commentary that underlay The City of the Dead is missing. Gran depicts the dichotomy of San Francisco--tech/hippies, wealthy/street-dwellers.Though she shows some of the great disparities and difficulties, there's no elucidation.
Gran does continue to offer up some philosophical thoughts.
"Karma can't be negotiated. But it does take interesting twists and turns. It's like you're given a series of words and it's up to you what kind of story you fit them into."
I found this to be an interesting idea. The concept of free will v. determination has appeared in two of my recent reads--Strout's Oh William! and Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog. The idea of this combination appeals to me. I do believe that we make our choices and they strongly impact our lives. And I do believe the universe provides us with opportunities that we can say yes or no to if we are even open enough to hear them.
"In my book, love is a physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they're in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone even when they don't call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is . . . earth and shit and blood and hair."
And this quote, yeah, love is hard. That's why so many of us walk away from it. Getting down in the trenches and doing the work is not for sissies. It calls for commitment; whether it be in caring for aging parents, working through issues with our partners, holding onto relationships with our children, or working through differences and hardships with friends.
"I felt bad for all of us, for the whole fucking world. Our fucking hearts. No wonder they were so hard to come by these days. They were hiding from us, trying to preserve what little life they had left for someone who would appreciate them. Or at least not murder them."
And where there is a lot of pain, many of us chose to bury our hearts or put up high walls to protect them. So many of us choose not to engage with life and people so the joys as well as the sorrows are missed. Life requires courage.
"There are no coincidences. Only doors you didn't have the courage to walk through. Only blind spots you weren't brave enough to see. Only tones you refused to admit you could hear."
And then Gran ends the book with a cliff-hanger. I guess I won't wait as long before reading the third book in this trilogy if I want to see how it resolves.
With Claire Dewitt and the Bohemian Highway Sara Gran has written another unusual, character driven detective story.
It's not necessary to have read the first book in this series to understand this story. However, you will appreciate it a lot more if you have.
This book got off to a slow start for me. Then once I was engaged, it held me in its grip until the end.
Gran uses the dual timeline strategy to reveal more of Claire's past. She returns to 1986 Brooklyn with a case that she and her friend Tracy solve as teens. More of Claire's backstory is revealed and I understand more of the big hole in Claire's psyche. She pairs this with current 2011 San Francisco as Claire investigates the murder of an ex-boyfriend.
The Bohemian Highway is grittier than The City of the Dead. Claire is sliding deeper into drug addiction as she self-medicates to protect herself from pain. There is less humor, and the humor is darker. For example, as Claire and her assistant investigate some missing miniature horses:
“My theory was that the little fellows were running away to try to get some big boy genes back in the mix, or maybe committing suicide. I made a mental note to research equine suicides.”
The social commentary that underlay The City of the Dead is missing. Gran depicts the dichotomy of San Francisco--tech/hippies, wealthy/street-dwellers.Though she shows some of the great disparities and difficulties, there's no elucidation.
Gran does continue to offer up some philosophical thoughts.
"Karma can't be negotiated. But it does take interesting twists and turns. It's like you're given a series of words and it's up to you what kind of story you fit them into."
I found this to be an interesting idea. The concept of free will v. determination has appeared in two of my recent reads--Strout's Oh William! and Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog. The idea of this combination appeals to me. I do believe that we make our choices and they strongly impact our lives. And I do believe the universe provides us with opportunities that we can say yes or no to if we are even open enough to hear them.
"In my book, love is a physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they're in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone even when they don't call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is . . . earth and shit and blood and hair."
And this quote, yeah, love is hard. That's why so many of us walk away from it. Getting down in the trenches and doing the work is not for sissies. It calls for commitment; whether it be in caring for aging parents, working through issues with our partners, holding onto relationships with our children, or working through differences and hardships with friends.
"I felt bad for all of us, for the whole fucking world. Our fucking hearts. No wonder they were so hard to come by these days. They were hiding from us, trying to preserve what little life they had left for someone who would appreciate them. Or at least not murder them."
And where there is a lot of pain, many of us chose to bury our hearts or put up high walls to protect them. So many of us choose not to engage with life and people so the joys as well as the sorrows are missed. Life requires courage.
"There are no coincidences. Only doors you didn't have the courage to walk through. Only blind spots you weren't brave enough to see. Only tones you refused to admit you could hear."
And then Gran ends the book with a cliff-hanger. I guess I won't wait as long before reading the third book in this trilogy if I want to see how it resolves.
With Claire Dewitt and the Bohemian Highway Sara Gran has written another unusual, character driven detective story.
November 25, 2012
I really love these books. I can't help it. Why isn't everyone talking about Clair all the time?
June 16, 2026
Claire DeWitt is back! After New Orleans, she now investigates a case in San Francisco. What’s more important, though, is the fact that it’s a murder this time, and the crucial point is that the dead person is her ex-boyfriend Paul. Claire tries to view him merely as “the victim” and to treat the case just like any other murder investigation, but of course this attempt is doomed to failure. She takes more and more drugs to be able to function, to maintain her stoic façade and to numb the pain. But the gaping abyss is waiting …
The laconic, matter-of-fact narrative style in this story could have been funny (and it still is, to some extent!), just like Claire’s casual actions such as visiting people in the middle of the night, sleeping with men or women she’s just met or buying and stealing drugs wherever she goes. But since it’s used to point out the increasingly desolate state of the first-person narrator’s state of mind, it’s first and foremost painful. It hurts to read about Claire’s many deep mental scars, the loneliness and hopelessness of the former neglected child who has always desperately tried to hide her vulnerability and to save others instead of saving herself.
Sure, it’s interesting to follow Claire’s (very unconventional) investigative work, but ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who murdered Paul, because he is and stays dead, no matter what.
The second Claire DeWitt volume is again, or even more than the first book, a deeply philosophical novel about an extraordinary main character and one of the most exceptional investigators in literary history.
The book still reverberates with me. Brilliant!
The laconic, matter-of-fact narrative style in this story could have been funny (and it still is, to some extent!), just like Claire’s casual actions such as visiting people in the middle of the night, sleeping with men or women she’s just met or buying and stealing drugs wherever she goes. But since it’s used to point out the increasingly desolate state of the first-person narrator’s state of mind, it’s first and foremost painful. It hurts to read about Claire’s many deep mental scars, the loneliness and hopelessness of the former neglected child who has always desperately tried to hide her vulnerability and to save others instead of saving herself.
Sure, it’s interesting to follow Claire’s (very unconventional) investigative work, but ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who murdered Paul, because he is and stays dead, no matter what.
The second Claire DeWitt volume is again, or even more than the first book, a deeply philosophical novel about an extraordinary main character and one of the most exceptional investigators in literary history.
The book still reverberates with me. Brilliant!
July 21, 2013
Vintage, vintage, vintage. On every page. Sometimes, seemingly, in every paragraph. For about two-thirds of this book, vintage was Sara Gran's favorite adjective. All of her characters wear vintage clothing. They all shop in vintage record shops or book stores or clothing and accessory stores. Often, they even drive vintage cars. Okay, we get the idea. It's cool to love vintage things.
This is the kind of quirk that can irritate me almost beyond endurance when reading a book - the repetitive use of a word. Yes, I realize that might be perceived as petty. So sue me! It's my pet peeve and I'm sticking with it.
At a certain point in the book, Gran seemed to realize what she was doing and she stopped using the word, cold turkey. Never used it again. But she found synonyms or other ways of conveying the same idea.
I really liked Gran's first Claire DeWitt book which was set in New Orleans, and I had looked forward to reading this one. It started off very well. I was happy to make Claire's acquaintance again and to see her in her home city of San Francisco. The mystery that she was engaged in solving - who murdered an old lover of hers - was one that intrigued me. Then I got hung up on the repetition of "vintage" and Claire's downward spiral into drug addiction and the whole thing just kind of fell apart for me.
In Bohemian Highway, we meet a Claire who is clearly out of control and not functioning well in her life's destiny as a detective. She spends much of her time searching out sources for purchasing cocaine and whenever she visits anyone's house or apartment, either as part of the investigation or just because, she seeks the bathroom and checks the bathroom cabinet for drugs. If she finds Percocet or Vicodin or Valium or anything else that will help her get high, she takes one or two of the pills and puts the rest in her purse. If she finds cocaine in the house, she steals it.
She is, in short, a mess. Her nose is constantly bleeding. Half the time it's not clear whether she's experiencing reality or some drug-induced dream. It is thoroughly depressing.
And yet, we are led to believe that her finely honed instinct for detection is totally intact and that she is able to intuit the clues that she needs to eventually solve this case. I have no experience with cocaine, but somehow, I just don't think that's the way it works, especially when you are mixing cocaine with Vicodin, Percocet, Valium, Adderall or whatever else the next medicine cabinet holds. Yes, one has to suspend disbelief when reading fiction and allow the author his/her artistic license, but this was too much for me.
Sara Gran is a talented writer and there were parts of the book that I really, really liked. They mostly occurred in the first third of so of the novel. In the end, I gave the book three stars, but if I could have given two-and-a-half, that would have been a truer reflection of my reaction.
I'm sure that Gran had a method in mind and that she was working from a plan in presenting her main character in the way she did, but I can't really discern what the purpose was. The book ended on a cliffhanger, so I am sure that another entry in the Claire DeWitt story is forthcoming. I hope that her creator will see fit to put Claire back in control of her addiction and allow her to become a more likable human being. I'll be less eager to read the next book unless I have an inkling that something like that has happened.
This is the kind of quirk that can irritate me almost beyond endurance when reading a book - the repetitive use of a word. Yes, I realize that might be perceived as petty. So sue me! It's my pet peeve and I'm sticking with it.
At a certain point in the book, Gran seemed to realize what she was doing and she stopped using the word, cold turkey. Never used it again. But she found synonyms or other ways of conveying the same idea.
I really liked Gran's first Claire DeWitt book which was set in New Orleans, and I had looked forward to reading this one. It started off very well. I was happy to make Claire's acquaintance again and to see her in her home city of San Francisco. The mystery that she was engaged in solving - who murdered an old lover of hers - was one that intrigued me. Then I got hung up on the repetition of "vintage" and Claire's downward spiral into drug addiction and the whole thing just kind of fell apart for me.
In Bohemian Highway, we meet a Claire who is clearly out of control and not functioning well in her life's destiny as a detective. She spends much of her time searching out sources for purchasing cocaine and whenever she visits anyone's house or apartment, either as part of the investigation or just because, she seeks the bathroom and checks the bathroom cabinet for drugs. If she finds Percocet or Vicodin or Valium or anything else that will help her get high, she takes one or two of the pills and puts the rest in her purse. If she finds cocaine in the house, she steals it.
She is, in short, a mess. Her nose is constantly bleeding. Half the time it's not clear whether she's experiencing reality or some drug-induced dream. It is thoroughly depressing.
And yet, we are led to believe that her finely honed instinct for detection is totally intact and that she is able to intuit the clues that she needs to eventually solve this case. I have no experience with cocaine, but somehow, I just don't think that's the way it works, especially when you are mixing cocaine with Vicodin, Percocet, Valium, Adderall or whatever else the next medicine cabinet holds. Yes, one has to suspend disbelief when reading fiction and allow the author his/her artistic license, but this was too much for me.
Sara Gran is a talented writer and there were parts of the book that I really, really liked. They mostly occurred in the first third of so of the novel. In the end, I gave the book three stars, but if I could have given two-and-a-half, that would have been a truer reflection of my reaction.
I'm sure that Gran had a method in mind and that she was working from a plan in presenting her main character in the way she did, but I can't really discern what the purpose was. The book ended on a cliffhanger, so I am sure that another entry in the Claire DeWitt story is forthcoming. I hope that her creator will see fit to put Claire back in control of her addiction and allow her to become a more likable human being. I'll be less eager to read the next book unless I have an inkling that something like that has happened.
January 12, 2019
4.5 stars
"Maybe that was all there was to life. One long case, only you kept switching roles. Detective, witness, client, suspect. Then one day I'd be the victim instead of the detective or the client and it would all be over. Then I'd finally have a f***ing day off." -- Claire DeWitt, P.I. on the 'joys' of her profession
No 'sophomore slump' here, Sara Gran churns out a nearly-as-good follow-up to her anti-heroine character's debut Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead with the sort-of sequel Bohemian Highway. This time around DeWitt is back on the streets of San Francisco (her usual base of operations) to take on a case that appears to be a residential burglary-turned-homicide. This one's really personal -- the victim was ex-boyfriend Paul, a good man she let drift away years ago because of her fears and immaturity. It also involves friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances as DeWitt does the usual P.I. legwork all over the storied Bay Area to solve the mystery she dubs 'The Case of Kali Yuga.' Like in the debut the first-person narration (so prevalent in private eye novels) is again used very well.
There is some odd, dark humor. A reader could make a fatal drinking game out of how many times DeWitt notes she stops to take "a bump" of cocaine throughout the investigation. Her prescription pill abuse, obvious in the first book, is now - or more recognizable as - a full-blown drug addiction.
Then there are the flashbacks to her unusual teenage years in Brooklyn, highlighting her early work on a missing person incident involving a classmate. It is fairly depressing and disgusting, but it also helpfully colors in DeWitt's backstory, providing some explanation of her screwed-up adulthood.
However, just when appears DeWitt may be turning into a joke or pushover (or, in this story, a hopeless lost cause) her innate resourcefulness and gumption keep her on top and trucking along.
Lastly, I realize when I picture DeWitt in my mind that she resembles author/creator Sara Gran (her photograph graces the dust jacket of both books) - I'm not sure whether Ms. Gran would think that's a compliment or not. However, it's fun thinking of what the fictional DeWitt would say about it.
"Maybe that was all there was to life. One long case, only you kept switching roles. Detective, witness, client, suspect. Then one day I'd be the victim instead of the detective or the client and it would all be over. Then I'd finally have a f***ing day off." -- Claire DeWitt, P.I. on the 'joys' of her profession
No 'sophomore slump' here, Sara Gran churns out a nearly-as-good follow-up to her anti-heroine character's debut Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead with the sort-of sequel Bohemian Highway. This time around DeWitt is back on the streets of San Francisco (her usual base of operations) to take on a case that appears to be a residential burglary-turned-homicide. This one's really personal -- the victim was ex-boyfriend Paul, a good man she let drift away years ago because of her fears and immaturity. It also involves friends, friends of friends, and acquaintances as DeWitt does the usual P.I. legwork all over the storied Bay Area to solve the mystery she dubs 'The Case of Kali Yuga.' Like in the debut the first-person narration (so prevalent in private eye novels) is again used very well.
There is some odd, dark humor. A reader could make a fatal drinking game out of how many times DeWitt notes she stops to take "a bump" of cocaine throughout the investigation. Her prescription pill abuse, obvious in the first book, is now - or more recognizable as - a full-blown drug addiction.
Then there are the flashbacks to her unusual teenage years in Brooklyn, highlighting her early work on a missing person incident involving a classmate. It is fairly depressing and disgusting, but it also helpfully colors in DeWitt's backstory, providing some explanation of her screwed-up adulthood.
However, just when appears DeWitt may be turning into a joke or pushover (or, in this story, a hopeless lost cause) her innate resourcefulness and gumption keep her on top and trucking along.
Lastly, I realize when I picture DeWitt in my mind that she resembles author/creator Sara Gran (her photograph graces the dust jacket of both books) - I'm not sure whether Ms. Gran would think that's a compliment or not. However, it's fun thinking of what the fictional DeWitt would say about it.
July 30, 2021
According to one school of thought we were in the Kali Yuga, a long stretch of time that might be as short as a hundred thousand years or as long as a million, depending on who you asked. In other yugas we have been, and will be, better looking and kinder and taller and we won't kill each other all the time. The sky will be clear and the sun will shine. But in the Kali Yuga every virtue is engulfed in sin. All the good books are gone. Everyone marries the wrong person and no one is content with what they've got. The wise sell secrets and sadhus live in palaces. There's a demon named Kali; he loves slaughterhouses and gold. He likes to gamble and he likes to fuck things up.
Friends, maybe we are living in the Kali Yuga, but Claire is wrong when she says there are no good books.
I wasn't sure what to make of the first book in this series, but I couldn't forget it. And now I'm fully onboard (sadly, the series only goes to book 3 currently with no word on more.) Claire DeWitt is the world's greatest living detective, but unlike Hercule Poirot she uses more than a touch of metaphysics to solve her cases. She also snorts a lot of coke and if you let her in your house, she will definitely take anything good you've got in the medicine cabinet.
But I still love her, the melancholy enchantress.
Years ago, when we were finished being children, my friend Tracy found a copy of Jacques Silette's little yellow book Détection in my parents' musty, bitter house in Brooklyn. After that we were ruined: being detectives was all that mattered to us. Especially Tracy, who became the best detective of us all--and when she vanished a few years later became a mystery herself, leaving only a Tracy-shaped hole behind, a paper doll cut out from the page.
Claire is haunted by the never-solved disappearance of her childhood friend Tracy and now she's dealing with the murder of an ex, a murder she swears to solve. Another person she loved in her relatively short life is now gone.
"We don't go through these trials just for the hell of it, you know," the lama said. "We go through them for wisdom. For purification. So we don't make the same mistakes next time."
I didn't want a next time. I didn't want to learn any more fucking lessons. I wanted to be with Tracy again. With Constance. With Paul. With people who loved me. I wanted to start over with them, to be someone else.
Whew, something about that quote--this whole book, really--just hit me deep in the feels and I kind of love Sara Gran for that.
There are no coincidences. Only doors you didn't have to courage to walk through. Only blind spots you weren't brave enough to see. Only tones you refused to admit you could hear.
For a complete change of pace, Gran also wrote a spiteful gem of a short horror novel, Come Closer. Whatever she writes (she's also written for the New York Times, amongst others), I'll pretty much read now.
Friends, maybe we are living in the Kali Yuga, but Claire is wrong when she says there are no good books.
I wasn't sure what to make of the first book in this series, but I couldn't forget it. And now I'm fully onboard (sadly, the series only goes to book 3 currently with no word on more.) Claire DeWitt is the world's greatest living detective, but unlike Hercule Poirot she uses more than a touch of metaphysics to solve her cases. She also snorts a lot of coke and if you let her in your house, she will definitely take anything good you've got in the medicine cabinet.
But I still love her, the melancholy enchantress.
Years ago, when we were finished being children, my friend Tracy found a copy of Jacques Silette's little yellow book Détection in my parents' musty, bitter house in Brooklyn. After that we were ruined: being detectives was all that mattered to us. Especially Tracy, who became the best detective of us all--and when she vanished a few years later became a mystery herself, leaving only a Tracy-shaped hole behind, a paper doll cut out from the page.
Claire is haunted by the never-solved disappearance of her childhood friend Tracy and now she's dealing with the murder of an ex, a murder she swears to solve. Another person she loved in her relatively short life is now gone.
"We don't go through these trials just for the hell of it, you know," the lama said. "We go through them for wisdom. For purification. So we don't make the same mistakes next time."
I didn't want a next time. I didn't want to learn any more fucking lessons. I wanted to be with Tracy again. With Constance. With Paul. With people who loved me. I wanted to start over with them, to be someone else.
Whew, something about that quote--this whole book, really--just hit me deep in the feels and I kind of love Sara Gran for that.
There are no coincidences. Only doors you didn't have to courage to walk through. Only blind spots you weren't brave enough to see. Only tones you refused to admit you could hear.
For a complete change of pace, Gran also wrote a spiteful gem of a short horror novel, Come Closer. Whatever she writes (she's also written for the New York Times, amongst others), I'll pretty much read now.
February 9, 2024
I really like Claire DeWitt and her unconventional methods of solving crime. The fictional detective Sillette is interesting. It's all quite entertaining. In this she solves the murder of an ex and also does way too much cocaine.
I'm afraid I started to dislike the flipping back and forth between the past and the present, between when she was a teenager and an adult. I get that this is the shtick, the big overarching mystery (the friend still missing) and the current ones. I like it all, they are good. I just think the book would be a smoother read if it was just one story at a time.
I'm afraid I started to dislike the flipping back and forth between the past and the present, between when she was a teenager and an adult. I get that this is the shtick, the big overarching mystery (the friend still missing) and the current ones. I like it all, they are good. I just think the book would be a smoother read if it was just one story at a time.
September 4, 2026
Claire DeWitt is sarcastic, reckless, an alcoholic and a junkie. If she weren't a fictional character, she would likely be dead already. She is also the most interesting and original fictional detective that I have encountered in a long time.
This is the second in a series; it helps but isn't essential to have read the first. Background about Claire and other recurring characters is doled out gradually in both. There are two main mysteries, one in current day San Francisco, one in Brooklyn roughly twenty years earlier. Claire's methods of detection (based on those of her mentor, Jacques Silette) are eccentric, to say the least. But she gets results, in a kind of random, Jungian synchronicity way. Except, so far, in solving her own mystery.
Some quotes (in order of appearance):
(I've been on retreats with quite a few lamas, and this is the best description of karma that I have ever encountered!)
This is the second in a series; it helps but isn't essential to have read the first. Background about Claire and other recurring characters is doled out gradually in both. There are two main mysteries, one in current day San Francisco, one in Brooklyn roughly twenty years earlier. Claire's methods of detection (based on those of her mentor, Jacques Silette) are eccentric, to say the least. But she gets results, in a kind of random, Jungian synchronicity way. Except, so far, in solving her own mystery.
Some quotes (in order of appearance):
We all want to be someone else. And sometimes we succeed in convincing ourselves we can be.
"The truth holds no prisoners," Silette wrote. "It takes no hostages. And if you don't want to meet with the same terrible fate, better not to approach at all. Stay on the other side of town, outside of the woods, and do not enter, at any cost."
I looked at the floor and shivered. A feeling came over me, a black feeling like I'd fallen into a pool of dirty water. Like I'd stepped into the woods and didn't know my way back.
"Maybe," the lama said. "I don't really think so. Planned is the wrong word. Karma can't be negotiated. But it does take interesting twists and turns. It's like you're given a series of words and it's up to you what kind of story you fit them into."
(I've been on retreats with quite a few lamas, and this is the best description of karma that I have ever encountered!)
"For lifetimes, I knew Chloe and I were bound, whether I found her this time, or the last time, or the next time. She would always be the missing girl and I would always be the detective. And I would be missing, and she, the detective, would find me. We were bound together, but we had choices; we could live in heaven together or in hell. Either way we'd be stuck with each other, and the ripples from our choices would would change every last word ever said."
Maybe out of everything I thought I knew, there was nothing I was more wrong about than my own life story.
"We all gonna be okay someday," the voice said. "But I don't know about today
September 15, 2020
In my review for the first book in the series (by the way this is mainly character based, so reading the series in order is suggested) I was surprised more reviewers had not pegged DeWitt as a junkie. She referred to herself as the greatest detective while doing drugs and coming off as a bit inept. She quoted Silette's Detection, supposedly the greatest book about crime solving but it often seemed Silette was on pretty strong psychedelics. This one leaves no doubts, DeWitt is investigating the death of the one that got away, musician ex boyfriend Paul and is coming apart at the seams.
DeWitt is pretty much running on cocaine and bad judgment here. She steals from medicine cabinets of suspects and witnesses alike, sleeps with anything that moves and is generally feeling so pessimistic that it is no wonder the books never really hit the sales figures that lesser mysteries hit on a regular basis. Among crime authors, only James Crumley feature protagonists as far gone as Gran's. In both the cases, the authors seem to draw from their years of personal experience with habits. Crumley was an alcoholic and it would not surprise me if Gran has done her fair share of narcotics. Their protagonists are losers. The law was for people who needed instructions is their motto. They are neither romanticized nor do they discover they had a heart of gold all along, they are self destructive agents of chaos that carry a bone deep sense of lives wasted.
It is however not as good as the first one. The action moves from New Orleans to San Francisco, and dilapidated post Katrina Orleans was a much better setting for the lead. It needed more lines like San Francisco wasn’t so big, but people liked to pretend they were in a big city here, with no time for sympathy. Plus the first book had a more focused narrative. Here we get a lot more of DeWitt's backstory, a mystery from the past that sets her on her current path is revealed via flashbacks. I just felt Gran's heart was not in either of the mysteries, they are the backdrop to understand DeWitt. So while there are wonderfully written segments where anyone who has felt frustrated by life will relate with DeWitt, the book as a whole is a tad inconsistent. It also ends on an unnecessary cliffhanger as a lead in to the third book.
A problem from the previous back also returns, some of the drug induced hallucinations start to drag. If you have talked to someone who is high, you know most of what they blabber will not make sense. DeWitt's episodes have that feeling, so they feel authentic but they are not always interesting to read. Don't expect a great mystery, expect some wonderful prose and a great protagonist and you will be satisfied. It is just that I know Gran can do better. Rating - 3/5
Quotes: Just as scared as everyone else of giving up their worst self. The self they knew the best.
When you love something so much, the thought of doing it but not doing it well hurts almost more than never trying. Almost. You wouldn’t know until you tried it that failing is actually better.
P.S. Incidentally it always amazes me how much this series and hippies in general love to dwell on the Eastern mysticism specially Indian mythology. DeWitt calls her mystery The Case of the Kali Yuga. Plus there are other references. India was actually one of the last large countries to criminalize marijuana after Reagan's goading, though ganja has been part of its culture for centuries, hence the hippie love. Hindsight has exposed every Republican President since Nixon as a magnet for iffy decision making and most countries are slowly making medical marijuana legal. Yet in a sad turn of events India is demonizing weed with every passing day. Marijuana being illegal has never made sense to me so I guess it is time for me to go and commit my favorite crime.
DeWitt is pretty much running on cocaine and bad judgment here. She steals from medicine cabinets of suspects and witnesses alike, sleeps with anything that moves and is generally feeling so pessimistic that it is no wonder the books never really hit the sales figures that lesser mysteries hit on a regular basis. Among crime authors, only James Crumley feature protagonists as far gone as Gran's. In both the cases, the authors seem to draw from their years of personal experience with habits. Crumley was an alcoholic and it would not surprise me if Gran has done her fair share of narcotics. Their protagonists are losers. The law was for people who needed instructions is their motto. They are neither romanticized nor do they discover they had a heart of gold all along, they are self destructive agents of chaos that carry a bone deep sense of lives wasted.
It is however not as good as the first one. The action moves from New Orleans to San Francisco, and dilapidated post Katrina Orleans was a much better setting for the lead. It needed more lines like San Francisco wasn’t so big, but people liked to pretend they were in a big city here, with no time for sympathy. Plus the first book had a more focused narrative. Here we get a lot more of DeWitt's backstory, a mystery from the past that sets her on her current path is revealed via flashbacks. I just felt Gran's heart was not in either of the mysteries, they are the backdrop to understand DeWitt. So while there are wonderfully written segments where anyone who has felt frustrated by life will relate with DeWitt, the book as a whole is a tad inconsistent. It also ends on an unnecessary cliffhanger as a lead in to the third book.
A problem from the previous back also returns, some of the drug induced hallucinations start to drag. If you have talked to someone who is high, you know most of what they blabber will not make sense. DeWitt's episodes have that feeling, so they feel authentic but they are not always interesting to read. Don't expect a great mystery, expect some wonderful prose and a great protagonist and you will be satisfied. It is just that I know Gran can do better. Rating - 3/5
Quotes: Just as scared as everyone else of giving up their worst self. The self they knew the best.
When you love something so much, the thought of doing it but not doing it well hurts almost more than never trying. Almost. You wouldn’t know until you tried it that failing is actually better.
P.S. Incidentally it always amazes me how much this series and hippies in general love to dwell on the Eastern mysticism specially Indian mythology. DeWitt calls her mystery The Case of the Kali Yuga. Plus there are other references. India was actually one of the last large countries to criminalize marijuana after Reagan's goading, though ganja has been part of its culture for centuries, hence the hippie love. Hindsight has exposed every Republican President since Nixon as a magnet for iffy decision making and most countries are slowly making medical marijuana legal. Yet in a sad turn of events India is demonizing weed with every passing day. Marijuana being illegal has never made sense to me so I guess it is time for me to go and commit my favorite crime.
September 14, 2022
All the excellence of the first but looking primarily back, to things eluded to in the previous book—only I didn’t find the actual case as idiosyncratic. Hell of an ending though. Not remotely a chance I’ll miss out on the conclusion.
August 31, 2018
Claire DeWitt, the world's greatest detective, returns to California after solving a case in New Orleans (book 1, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead). Her ex-boyfriend Paul Casablancas, a well known local musician, is found dead in his home and police believe he was shot after surprising an intruder during a robbery in progress. The killer took several guitars and locked the door from the inside when leaving the home.
After learning the door was locked from the inside, Claire believes the murder was much more personal than a robbery. She looks back on her relationship with Paul and takes a closer look at his marriage and his music with help from old friends and her new assistant Claude.
Claire has a habit of reminiscing on old cases that lead her to clues in present cases. As a follower of master PI Jacques Silette and his book Detection, she knows that nothing is ever as simple as it seems and there are no coincidences, only fate.
Working this personal case has Claire relying heavily on drugs (again) and more haunted than ever by another unsolved personal case: the disappearance of her best friend Tracy when they were teenagers. Tracy's disappearance was discussed at length in the first novel and we get quite a bit of new information through flashbacks in this book.
Once again Claire uses copious amounts of drugs, mystical dreams (hallucinations perhaps?), and information from some strange characters to lead her to the truth.
On a self destructive path to destiny, Claire manages to solve the case of Paul's murder while leaving many unanswered questions: how is such a small amount of people finding the Silette novel Detection and then finding each other? How did Claire and her friends Kelly and Tracy have copies of the Cynthia Silverton mysteries in their childhood after we find out how extremely limited the copies were? What happened to Tracy?
So basically this book was a mystery within several other mysteries where we're building a case for all but solving a few at a time.
Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway ends with a frustrating cliffhanger. The PI has located the only known remaining copies of the Cynthia Silverton books from her childhood and mails a letter to the address in an ad for a detective home study course.
She then heads out of town in search of Andray (a character from the first novel) who she believes is destined to become another Silette detective, after he fails to show up in Las Vegas to meet a friend. She lets her assistant Claude know finding Andray is her next case --
and then she realizes it's not her paranoia: a Lincoln is following her through Oakland...
You won't get any spoilers from me! I'll just end with this quote from Silette:
"Mysteries never end. And we solve them anyway, knowing we are solving both everything and nothing. We solve them knowing the world will surely be as poorly or even worse off than before. But this is the piece of life we have been given authority over, nothing else; and while we may ask why over and over, no one yet has been given an answer."
If Claire has taught me anything, it's that everything is connected. I can't wait to read the third book in this series to see if we get answers about who is driving the Lincoln and why they're following Claire, Silette's book Detection and the group of followers its created, the Cynthia Silverton ad, Tracy's disappearance, and how they all connect!
For more full reviews, visit www.rootsandreads.wordpress.com
After learning the door was locked from the inside, Claire believes the murder was much more personal than a robbery. She looks back on her relationship with Paul and takes a closer look at his marriage and his music with help from old friends and her new assistant Claude.
Claire has a habit of reminiscing on old cases that lead her to clues in present cases. As a follower of master PI Jacques Silette and his book Detection, she knows that nothing is ever as simple as it seems and there are no coincidences, only fate.
Working this personal case has Claire relying heavily on drugs (again) and more haunted than ever by another unsolved personal case: the disappearance of her best friend Tracy when they were teenagers. Tracy's disappearance was discussed at length in the first novel and we get quite a bit of new information through flashbacks in this book.
Once again Claire uses copious amounts of drugs, mystical dreams (hallucinations perhaps?), and information from some strange characters to lead her to the truth.
On a self destructive path to destiny, Claire manages to solve the case of Paul's murder while leaving many unanswered questions: how is such a small amount of people finding the Silette novel Detection and then finding each other? How did Claire and her friends Kelly and Tracy have copies of the Cynthia Silverton mysteries in their childhood after we find out how extremely limited the copies were? What happened to Tracy?
So basically this book was a mystery within several other mysteries where we're building a case for all but solving a few at a time.
Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway ends with a frustrating cliffhanger. The PI has located the only known remaining copies of the Cynthia Silverton books from her childhood and mails a letter to the address in an ad for a detective home study course.
She then heads out of town in search of Andray (a character from the first novel) who she believes is destined to become another Silette detective, after he fails to show up in Las Vegas to meet a friend. She lets her assistant Claude know finding Andray is her next case --
and then she realizes it's not her paranoia: a Lincoln is following her through Oakland...
You won't get any spoilers from me! I'll just end with this quote from Silette:
"Mysteries never end. And we solve them anyway, knowing we are solving both everything and nothing. We solve them knowing the world will surely be as poorly or even worse off than before. But this is the piece of life we have been given authority over, nothing else; and while we may ask why over and over, no one yet has been given an answer."
If Claire has taught me anything, it's that everything is connected. I can't wait to read the third book in this series to see if we get answers about who is driving the Lincoln and why they're following Claire, Silette's book Detection and the group of followers its created, the Cynthia Silverton ad, Tracy's disappearance, and how they all connect!
For more full reviews, visit www.rootsandreads.wordpress.com
March 27, 2013
From start to finish, I was engrossed with the novel. When I wasn't reading it, I wanted to be reading it. Where others might turn away from the (admittedly intense) drug use and violence and seediness-of-humanity, I leaned into it. It's smart, funny, serious, and heartfelt - but not heartfelt in the way you usually hear that term. Instead, I mean here to say that it makes your heart feel things. If you read this book and connect with it, you might be a Silletian... and if you read it and shrug, then the truth - the real truth, the truth that does not set us free but rather keeps us trudging on - is not for you.
More at RB: http://wp.me/pGVzJ-Lu
More at RB: http://wp.me/pGVzJ-Lu
March 3, 2015
Fantastic. Very close to being a masterpiece. I love how Gran took the bold step to create a very different novel to the first entry in the series. Choosing to avoid a straight continuation of her quirky private eye tale, sending Claire DeWitt out on just another case etc, this odyssey is as much a portrait of despair and addiction and denial as it is a hardboiled detective story, something that verges on being comparable to classics of the genre such as The Long Goodbye or The Last Good Kiss. I don't have the time to do this wonderful novel justice with a comprehensive review but if you love noir and bleak literary private eye tales then Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt books are for you.
August 4, 2013
This one is definitely really a 4.5er for me. I think Sara Gran really brought Claire DeWitt to a new level in this one. The integration of cases past and present gave this book a cadence that made it hard for me to put it down (I think I read it in three days or so). A pleasure to read, while still thought-provoking on a profound level.
February 17, 2020
Anyone else find that the main character, Claire de Witt’s, constant coke and pill popping habit got in the way of the plot? I mean how many mystery solving ‘little grey cells’ would one have left with all the reckless over usage of drugs? That and the random sex with strangers and stealing their prescription drugs.
Oh and all the references to the detective’s bible got on my nerves too!
Oh and all the references to the detective’s bible got on my nerves too!
July 25, 2021
"Karma," he said once, "is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she chooses."
Love. Murder. A broken heart. The professor in the drawing room with candlestick. The detective in the bar with the gun. The guitar player backstage with the pick. Maybe it was true: Life was a series of words we'd been given to arrange as we pleased, only no one seemed to know how. A word game with no right solution, a crossword puzzle where we couldn't quite remember the name of that song.
Oh Claire. You beautiful, tortured soul. How raw, how honest. This book was so profound, despite being a crime novel. I'm heartbroken.
Also, I am semi-worried about the author. Some of the situations in this book are too nuanced to not be based on true events...
Love. Murder. A broken heart. The professor in the drawing room with candlestick. The detective in the bar with the gun. The guitar player backstage with the pick. Maybe it was true: Life was a series of words we'd been given to arrange as we pleased, only no one seemed to know how. A word game with no right solution, a crossword puzzle where we couldn't quite remember the name of that song.
Oh Claire. You beautiful, tortured soul. How raw, how honest. This book was so profound, despite being a crime novel. I'm heartbroken.
Also, I am semi-worried about the author. Some of the situations in this book are too nuanced to not be based on true events...
November 24, 2025
Claire snorts a lot of cocaine as she solves the mysteries.
August 14, 2015
The second Claire DeWitt book is as quirky as entertaining as the first; Sara Gran has managed to create a unique and offbeat female detective who so far drags you along on her cases because she's odd, intuitive, empathetic, a hot mess, and uses drugs and palm readings as often as she uses detective work, without involving us in an extensive backstory of past cases and subplots running through multiple books. Though there are recurring characters and references to Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, so this series may face the danger other detective series have succumbed to, of becoming less about the detective work and the cases and more about the ever-growing circle of friends and associates that make up the main character's supporting cast.
Claire DeWitt was taught by Constance Darling, the "world's greatest detective," who was a student of the famous detective Jacques Silette, the French "father of detective work." Gran has already created her own little mythos here in an onstensibly mundane detective series. In the second book of Claire's adventures, she is back home in San Francisco, when an ex-lover is killed. Claire, naturally, is put on the case. The wife is the most obvious suspect, of course, but solving her ex's murder is really the least interesting thing about this book - when all is revealed, it's the journey we remember.
We learn more about Claire's adolescence, as the book alternates between her current case and one of her first, back when she and one of her teenage friends were aspiring "girl detectives" and set out to find a missing friend in New York City. This turns out to be loosely tied to her current case, but mostly it's a deeper delve into what makes Claire so fucked up. Our protagonist unashamedly snorts lines of coke before interviewing people, passes out in bathrooms after one-night stands, has visions which are probably just hallucinations, and considers signs and omens to be clues. Yet she dispenses a sort of gritty worldly wisdom wrapped in New Age trappings, and always reminds us that what she is looking for is not justice, but truth, the thing her clients usually don't actually want.
Definitely one of my series to follow; Claire DeWitt is a strange bird and I hope she has more trips ahead of her.
Claire DeWitt was taught by Constance Darling, the "world's greatest detective," who was a student of the famous detective Jacques Silette, the French "father of detective work." Gran has already created her own little mythos here in an onstensibly mundane detective series. In the second book of Claire's adventures, she is back home in San Francisco, when an ex-lover is killed. Claire, naturally, is put on the case. The wife is the most obvious suspect, of course, but solving her ex's murder is really the least interesting thing about this book - when all is revealed, it's the journey we remember.
We learn more about Claire's adolescence, as the book alternates between her current case and one of her first, back when she and one of her teenage friends were aspiring "girl detectives" and set out to find a missing friend in New York City. This turns out to be loosely tied to her current case, but mostly it's a deeper delve into what makes Claire so fucked up. Our protagonist unashamedly snorts lines of coke before interviewing people, passes out in bathrooms after one-night stands, has visions which are probably just hallucinations, and considers signs and omens to be clues. Yet she dispenses a sort of gritty worldly wisdom wrapped in New Age trappings, and always reminds us that what she is looking for is not justice, but truth, the thing her clients usually don't actually want.
Definitely one of my series to follow; Claire DeWitt is a strange bird and I hope she has more trips ahead of her.
May 27, 2019
I loved this book! So much so that I broke my usual rule of not giving mysteries 5 stars; after all, how can most mysteries get the same number of stars as Dostoevsky, or Proust? And, of course, this book doesn't really stand next to those but I enjoyed it so much, I had to give it 5 stars.
Lately, I haven't been enjoying mysteries, a genre I used to love and turned to for relaxation. But most mysteries now feel predictable; even if I don't guess the ending (which I usually do) the world is too familiar to me. But this book shook me up.
Claire is about 40, give or take a year, and has seen a lot of the world. She is hardly a figure to emulate: a devotee of cocaine and casual sex and an extremely negative world-view, she also has an almost childlike belief in the existence of ultimate truth and that people are worth saving or if they have been killed, worth knowing who did it. A follower of (imaginary) detective Jacques Silette, detection is a mystical art for Claire (one way he teaches to solve mysteries is through dreams).
In Bohemian Highway, a former lover of Claire's is murdered, seemingly in the course of a highway. Along with solving this case, Claire investigates several others: the murder of miniature horses and the disappearance of an old, teenage friend (the book also narrates Claire's life as an adolescent detective back in Brooklyn--I especially loved those chapters and the look at teenage Claire, newly discovering Silette and the art of detection). Claire drugs her way through the case, with many unwelcome discoveries about herself as well as the crime at hand.
The atmosphere is Raymond Chandlerlesque with San Francisco as its noir background. Claire is as jaded and skeptical as is appropriate for this genre.
This is the second book in the series (don't ask why I started with the second: I have no idea). I can't wait to read the first one, which I've already bought, and which I hear is even better than the second. Hopefully, there will be many installment, all of the high quality of this one. I've given up on most series but I am looking forward to this one. Gran is a fine and original writer. May she write many more books!
Lately, I haven't been enjoying mysteries, a genre I used to love and turned to for relaxation. But most mysteries now feel predictable; even if I don't guess the ending (which I usually do) the world is too familiar to me. But this book shook me up.
Claire is about 40, give or take a year, and has seen a lot of the world. She is hardly a figure to emulate: a devotee of cocaine and casual sex and an extremely negative world-view, she also has an almost childlike belief in the existence of ultimate truth and that people are worth saving or if they have been killed, worth knowing who did it. A follower of (imaginary) detective Jacques Silette, detection is a mystical art for Claire (one way he teaches to solve mysteries is through dreams).
In Bohemian Highway, a former lover of Claire's is murdered, seemingly in the course of a highway. Along with solving this case, Claire investigates several others: the murder of miniature horses and the disappearance of an old, teenage friend (the book also narrates Claire's life as an adolescent detective back in Brooklyn--I especially loved those chapters and the look at teenage Claire, newly discovering Silette and the art of detection). Claire drugs her way through the case, with many unwelcome discoveries about herself as well as the crime at hand.
The atmosphere is Raymond Chandlerlesque with San Francisco as its noir background. Claire is as jaded and skeptical as is appropriate for this genre.
This is the second book in the series (don't ask why I started with the second: I have no idea). I can't wait to read the first one, which I've already bought, and which I hear is even better than the second. Hopefully, there will be many installment, all of the high quality of this one. I've given up on most series but I am looking forward to this one. Gran is a fine and original writer. May she write many more books!
June 6, 2013
This is the second in Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt series after Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, and I simply cannot wait for #3 to come out. Claire DeWitt is not your ordinary detective. In addition to more standard methods of detection, Claire relies on mind altering substances, dreams, apparitions, signs, and symbols to get the job done. I think CNN put it best: “as if David Lynch directed a Raymond Chandler novel.”
In addition to the mystery at hand, the long-term mystery through both books has been the decades-long disappearance of Claire’s best friend and partner Tracy from their Brooklyn neighborhood. The first book, The City of the Dead, has Claire trying to locate an ADA in post-Katrina New Orleans. In the Bohemian Highway, we are taken to San Francisco as Claire tried to solve the brutal murder of her ex-boyfriend, popular local musician Paul Casablancas.
Gran is skilled at evoking a powerful sense of place, as well as creating a spooky ambiance as Claire not only tries to solve the mystery at hand, but also deals with the fallout from Tracy’s disappearance and her own particularly vicious demons. After reading this second installment, Sara Gran has already become one of my favorite authors. My next move is to go back and read her first two stand-alone novels – Dope, and Come Closer.
In addition to the mystery at hand, the long-term mystery through both books has been the decades-long disappearance of Claire’s best friend and partner Tracy from their Brooklyn neighborhood. The first book, The City of the Dead, has Claire trying to locate an ADA in post-Katrina New Orleans. In the Bohemian Highway, we are taken to San Francisco as Claire tried to solve the brutal murder of her ex-boyfriend, popular local musician Paul Casablancas.
Gran is skilled at evoking a powerful sense of place, as well as creating a spooky ambiance as Claire not only tries to solve the mystery at hand, but also deals with the fallout from Tracy’s disappearance and her own particularly vicious demons. After reading this second installment, Sara Gran has already become one of my favorite authors. My next move is to go back and read her first two stand-alone novels – Dope, and Come Closer.
July 25, 2013
As I remarked in yesterday's review of the first Claire DeWitt novel, Sara Gran is one of those writers who can't write fast enough for this reader. Her style is punchy and solid, with believable dialogue that zings. I didn't know until after completing this second book that she has written for one of my favorite tv shows, Southland. She peoples her books with characters she only could have met and elaborated on, as with the cities that Claire inhabits. There are more than one mysteries contained herein, and she gives her cases whimsical titles that almost make them into Nancy Drew books for adults (The Case of the Green Parrot, for example). But as with Jackson Brodie's continued inquest into his sister's death in Kate Atkinson's quartet of novels, Claire is haunted by the seemingly unsolvable disappearance of her best friend in 1987, Gran has said that she's only planning to write 4 novels in this series, which makes me as sad as Zoe Ferraris's announcement that she's stopping at the 3 novels in her Saudi Arabian thrillers. Some authors just know when to quit, but that makes it hard for those of us who admire their work.
August 4, 2013
It's not that the empress has no clothes--it's that she can't find them because she's coked out of her head. I truly loved the first Claire DeWitt. I was ready to be just as blown away by this one. I even saved it for last in my stack of books just so I could savor it. I've never done that before. All was well when I started out. I felt the rush I'd had with the first Claire. I was experiencing a new kind of mystery writing--until I wasn't. As I read on her whole way of detecting and the mentors she'd had became less and less interesting. It didn't take long for it to reach stale. I kept plodding through because, just like Claire suddenly knows what's on the other side of a door, I knew in my heart it wasn't going to get better but I'd still get some phrases to enjoy. Gran can be an amazingly creative writer but the few gems I find aren't worth reading the whole book. As for her little droplets of philosophy/wisdom most are useless or worse if you actually read them. Frankly, I get more enlightenment from the musings of Henri, Le Chat Noir, the Web's first existential philosopher cat. हमेशा के लिए अलविदा
March 11, 2019
I really enjoyed the first Claire DeWitt novel. I really struggled with this one. It started ok, then became pretty pointless. It wasn't necessarily the nihilism with the drugs and skanky behavior, that made it hard to read, it just seemed that the story was dragging on. Honestly, the current case wasn't that difficult to solve, it was pretty obvious who the murderer was. I quit reading it, and was not going to go back. Then in a moment of weakness I decided to pick it up and give it a go, and got close to the end, so I had to finish it. Despite not really enjoying the book, the cliff hanging finish now is luring me into reading the 3rd one. Clever ruse by the author, I haven't decided yet if I'll fall for it...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 4, 2021
more genius mystery writing from sara gran.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 669 reviews