Maybe I should say Vic embodies the best and worst of New Orleans. Vic Willing embodies the best and the worst of people. She is a loyal friend, a deeply insightful person and a brilliant detective. Claire is a fascinating character, who lies to almost everyone, never keeps a promise, never met a drug she didn’t try, and has had at least one psychotic episode. So is Claire so is Andrey, a street-kid she meets during the investigation. Claire is still haunted by this loss.Ĭity of the Dead is about dualities Vic is a complicated person. Three girls together discovered the book Detection, but one of them vanished. It is the disappearance of her girlhood friend. Part of the reason Claire’s less-mundane techniques work is because Gran plants them right next to the hyperrealism of her descriptions.Ĭlaire has to figure out what happened to Victor Willing, but the genesis of her role as a detective is a case that remains unsolved. Gran’s descriptions of the battered city, the devastation and the continued corruption are clear and concrete. This is one of the grittier mysteries I’ve read lately. This makes the book sounds airy-fairy and woo-woo, and it is not. A home without rice is a home without joy. A good man feeds rice to the snake, and at last he is full. When the queen weeps, the rice weeps with her. The snake swallows his own tail and is never satiated. To solve the mystery, Claire uses clues she finds on the street or on billboards, in dreams, or from I Ching hexagrams that are like none I’ve ever read.: ‘That’s where knowledge lives before somebody hunts it, kills it and mounts it in a book.’”
“ ‘Never be afraid to learn from the ether,’ Constance told me. Claire also had the chance to work with Constance Darling, on the Silette’s finest students, until Constance was murdered in New Orleans. It seems that the book often comes to future detectives in unusual ways. The book came to Claire in an unusual way when she was a child. Vic’s nephew, Leon, just wants closure.Ĭlaire learned the art of detection from a book written by the eccentric Frenchman Jacques Silette.
Victor Willing was probably the only uncorrupted DA in the entire parish, but there still is a hint of possible foul play. He just vanished, like so many others, but he was an assistant district attorney with money and connections. She charges a lot of money and she gets results, but her clients usually end up hating her – and that’s not at all surprising.Ĭlaire has come back to New Orleans, a city she knew well, two years after Hurricane Katrina, to find out what happened to her client’s uncle, who disappeared during the storm. Perhaps, like Claire DeWitt’s introduction to detection, it was meant to be.Ĭlaire DeWitt is nearly forty, and the best detective in the world. I hadn’t read anything by Sara Gran until I picked up Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead out of the 50% off bin.
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