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Claire Dewitt and The City of the Dead

CLAIRE DEWITT AND THE CITY OF THE DEAD by Sara Gran (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 273 pages. $30 cloth. Rating: NNNN


The cover of Claire Dewitt and The City Of The Dead, with its blurb about a detective who uses prophetic dreams, mind-expanding drugs and the I Ching to solve mysteries, almost made me toss it onto my giveaway pile. Lucky thing I didn’t, because novelist Sara Gran’s first book of a new series is one of the most original I’ve read.

The setting is New Orleans one year after Hurricane Katrina. The kids and dealers are back on the street corners, and it’s business as usual. Audacious private investigator Claire DeWitt – a detective since she was a teen – is summoned back to the city she once called home, now filled with the smells of plaster dust and mould, to solve the case of a prominent district attorney who went missing during the storm.

Like all great detectives, Claire has strong anarchistic tendencies that work fine in corruption-ridden New Orleans. The city is drowning, but so is Claire – in the unsolved disappearance of her best friend 20 years earlier and the recent loss of her mentor, Constance, to a random shooting.

Gran’s story is as deep as the waters that engulfed the city. In a clever move, she’s inserted a book within the book, that being fictional French detective Jacques Silette’s handbook Détection, a talisman that flows like a lifeline through the story and whose philosophy of patience and observation guides Claire in her quest.

The people of New Orleans were largely abandoned after the hurricane. Gran gives a spellbinding account of what that felt like. In the city of no happy endings, nothing ever really ends. Or as Claire puts it, “The fat lady only changes her costume and goes on to the next show.”

Write Books at susanc@nowtoronto.com

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