"In her second outing, tattooed cokehead Claire DeWitt puzzles over the murder of an ex-boyfriend. There's absolutely nothing predictable about either the multilayered investigation—cloaked in references to Indian scriptures, Thomas Merton, and cheesy 1980s TV mysteries—or DeWitt herself, who charms despite her fraying life. A " — Entertainment Weekly "This is a heroine who is so flawed - and so achingly desperate to be otherwise — that you can't help but relate. . . .Claire's quest to avenge Paul is compelling, but her insistence on uncovering the mystery of her own self-destruction is what makes this book not just a compelling mystery, but a novel." — Oprah.com "The high-stepping, coke-snorting, Zen-loving heroine of Sara Gran's new novel is something of a mess, but she's also the most interesting private eye I've encountered since Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander. . . .She mostly follows her intuition, along with the precepts laid down by the great (and fictional) French detective Jacques Silette, who said things like, 'Solutions wait for you, trembling, pulling you to them, calling your name, even if you cannot hear.'" —Washington Post '"If Haruki Murakami wrote The Wire , it would come out something like Sara Gran; cryptic, dreamy, funny and gritty as hell. She's a phenomenal talent. Claire DeWitt is an unreliable detective unlike any other." — Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls "When I began reading a new mystery by Gran and realized I had entered a fresh, fully realized noir world, I felt a rush of private-eye, patriotic pride. . . . I highly recommend her introspective and yes, poetic mystery adventure." — Maureen Corrigan, NPR "From Nancy Drew to Miss Marple to Lisbeth Salander, there's a long and distinguished line of famous women in mystery fiction. I have a new favorite female sleuth to add to the list, Claire DeWitt." —CNN.com "The Claire DeWitt novels are not so much noir mysteries as stories about the nature of mysteries themselves. The stories are wise, chilling, insightful and reeking with despair—and yet so beautifully written in an original, quirky style that it is difficult to resist them. . . . Readers will marvel at Gran’s talent." —Bruce DeSilva, Associated Press "Most novels, regardless of genre, appeal to readers' minds or to their emotions. The dark mysticism of Gran's books, however, echoes within their souls." — Examiner.com "Claire DeWitt recognizes a clue by the weird chills she gets when she first encounters it, and she makes some of her most important deductions in dreams . . . She's a fortysomething, chemically adventurous, bed-hopping, gun-toting, hard-boiled, socially dysfunctional, existentially New Age Nancy Drew. . . It's well worth following her wherever she decides to look." — Laura Miller, Salon "Gran continues to reinvent the crime novel with her latest, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway , in which her inimitable protagonist follows a tangled web of cases involving the murder of Claire's musician ex-boyfriend, the mysterious theft of a group of miniature horses, and a trip down the rabbit hole of her own psyche." — Publishers Weekly —
Claire DeWitt, the high-stepping, coke-snorting, Zen-loving heroine of Sara Gran's new novel, Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway , is something of a mess, but she's also the most interesting private eye I've encountered since Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander. Claire's investigative methods are haphazard at best, but through her—seen both as a teenager in Brooklyn and as a woman in her late 30s in today's San Francisco—the author offers a gritty, ultra-realistic portrait of how one rebellious American woman has lived her life…This is Gran's second Claire DeWitt novel. It's a fascinating read, and it will be interesting to see what becomes of her unconventional, all-too-human private eye.
The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson
Gran succumbs to sophomore slump in her second Claire DeWitt mystery (after 2011’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead). An atypical PI who would be at home in a Hunter Thompson story, the sarcastic Claire relies on her dreams, mind-enhancing drugs, a computer-hacker assistant, and her professional bible, Détection by French detective Jacques Silette, to solve crimes. Claire has moved to San Francisco, where she’s caught up in the murder of her old boyfriend, Paul Casablancas, in what appears to be a botched robbery. She follows clues about Paul’s murder and comforts his rock-musician widow, Lydia Nunez, while investigating miniature horse thefts and while looking into the disappearance of an old friend who vanished during the 1980s in Manhattan’s East Village. Rehashed plot points, wearisome characters (Claire’s manic personality can grate), and a rushed denouement make this a lesser effort from a talented author. Agent: Barney Karpfinger, the Karpfinger Agency. (June)
Carol Monda might have been born to narrate the Claire DeWitt novels. . . . Her tight-jawed contralto is capable of conveying subtle vibrations of grief, yearning, pity, self-loathing and amusement. . . . Monda’s performance encompasses all . . . facets of her personality and more.”Salon
Monda’s sensitive reading . . . makes listeners root for the haunted detective in her quest for the truth.”Booklist
Monda’s sensitive reading . . . makes listeners root for the haunted detective in her quest for the truth.”Booklist
Narrator Carol Monda is terrific in this second Claire DeWitt detective story. Her deep voice manages the detached, no-nonsense affect of Jack Webb in the old “Dragnet” TV series while still making the listener care about Claire. Claire is working on two cases. Her former lover, Paul, has been murdered in what appears to be a botched robbery, and she and her assistant, Claude, are investigating the disappearance of valuable miniature horses. Monda does everything right. Her men sound masculine. Women sound like women. And when she quotes Jacques Silette, Claire’s detecting mentor, Monda’s French accent is convincing. Flashbacks and nightmares flesh out Claire’s backstory, and, as she becomes increasingly dependent on cocaine, Monda keeps a tight grip on a life flying out of control. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
"The very best detective in the world"--just ask her--solves what she dubs the Case of the Kali Yuga, with digressions to, among a hundred other subjects, the Case of the End of the World. Claire DeWitt isn't exactly sorry that guitarist Paul Casablancas split up with her and married her friend Lydia Nunez. But she's not ready for the news that Paul's been shot dead either. Detective Madeline Huong, of the San Francisco PD, is convinced with some reason that Paul, coming home around midnight, interrupted whoever was in the middle of stealing five of his guitars and was killed for his trouble. If it wasn't a robber, conventional wisdom says that the murderer was almost certainly the wife. But Claire, no slave to convention, decides she owes Paul's death a closer look. The trouble is that, both as detective and as narrator, Claire is so unfocused that you'd think she had a bad case of ADHD if it weren't for all the drugs she's taking. It's not just that she keeps interrupting her present-day story for a series of flashbacks to the time 25 years ago when she and her best bud Tracy went looking through darkest Brooklyn for their vanished friend Chloe Roman; almost any encounter with any of the dozens of people she talks to or sleeps with will act on Claire like a shiny object, unleashing dreams and memories and aphorisms from her idol Jacques Silette, the nonpareil detective who couldn't find his own missing daughter. Gran's structure is beyond episodic; there's just one scene after another, some funny, some just snarky, and the plot never thickens. Hip, smart, inventive and thoroughly infuriating. The heroine (Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead , 2011) is someone you'll either love or love to hate.
