Tuesday 4 December 2018

2 BY SARA GRAN

A couple this week from Sara Gran, author of the Claire DeWitt trilogy of books. I recently read and enjoyed the third in the series The Infinite Blacktop. Claire as you should know is the self-proclaimed "world's best detective."






















City of the Dead is the first in the trilogy and The Bohemian Highway the second.


I have a couple of other of her non-series books on the shelves - Come Closer and Dope.

Sara Grab has her website here.
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City of the Dead (2011)

Claire DeWitt is not your average private investigator. She has brilliant deductive skills and is an ace at discovering evidence. But Claire also uses her dreams, omens, and mind-expanding herbs to help her solve mysteries, and relies on Détection - the only book published by the late, great, and mysterious French detective Jacques Silette.

The tattooed, pot-smoking Claire has just arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans, the city she's avoided since her mentor, Silette's student Constance Darling, was murdered there. Claire is investigating the disappearance of Vic Willing, a prosecutor known for winning convictions in a homicide- plagued city. Has an angry criminal enacted revenge on Vic? Or did he use the storm as a means to disappear? Claire follows the clues, finding old friends and making new enemies - foremost among them Andray Fairview, a young gang member who just might hold the key to the mystery.

Littered with memories of Claire's years as a girl detective in 1980s Brooklyn, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is a knockout start to a bracingly original new series.

Claire DeWitt and The Bohemian Highway (2013)


Paul Casablancas, Claire DeWitt's ex-boyfriend, is a popular musician in the San Francisco scene. When he's found dead in his apartment, his cherished guitars missing, the police are convinced it's a simple robbery, but Claire knows 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 a gritty 1980s 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.





10 comments:

  1. I'm often tempted to drop whatever I'm reading and picking up a book with an attractive cover like CITY OF THE DEAD and the prospect of reading a new so-and-so mystery. If I gave in, I wouldn't be reading anything.

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    1. I'm always getting my head turned Prashant. I'm a sucker for a great cover!

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  2. These do sound good, Col. I really like the sound of Claire DeWitt as a character, and the setting interests me, too.

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    1. Based on the one I've read, I do think Sara Gran might be an author where our tastes overlap, Margot

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  3. Wot Prashant said! These look good, as did Infinite Blacktop, but self-discipline is required . . .

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    1. I'd hazard your library might have them? Not really breaking any embargoes visiting there, not in my book!

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  4. Glen has the Claire DeWitt series and likes the ones he has read, will be getting the latest one soon. I will be reading the first one sometime.

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    1. I'm keen to try the series from the beginning also. Maybe 2019!

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  5. She is sounding more and more appealing to me - I meant to snap one up when you mentioned her before, now I really must...

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    1. Definitely, make sure you let us know how you go!

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