The main thread of the book is Claire’s investigation into Paul’s murder. (The title refers to another house he and his wife have, on the Bohemian Highway north of San Francisco, which comes into play later in the book).
Several of his guitars are missing but the door to his house has been locked from the outside. In this most recent book, Claire is home in San Francisco, where her ex-boyfriend Paul, a wealthy musician, has been murdered in what looks like a botched robbery. Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead found her back in New Orleans, turning up old ghosts and uncovering new ones. In the wake of Constance’s murder, Claire wound up in San Francisco where she’d gained a reputation as the best - and most troubled - private detective in the world. When Tracy went missing and neither Claire nor Kelly could turn up any evidence on her disappearance, they parted ways and Claire went down a path that led her to Constance Darling, one of Silette’s greatest students, in New Orleans. They were devotees - as if by some sort of magical reckoning - of a French detective named Jacques Silette, whose book, Détection, they considered their Bible. Back in Brooklyn (where she’s from), Claire and her two best friends, Tracy and Kelly, were girl detectives who haunted Manhattan’s Lower East Side and hung out at dive bars like the Holiday Cocktail Lounge and solved mostly small-time cases. You do not need to have read the first entry in the series to appreciate Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, but if you’re like me and you sort of fall in love with Claire, you need to know some things about her to fully understand the swirl of desperation that consumes her. She’s conflicted, confused, the perfect guide through a ruined world of puzzles. Claire DeWitt is a detective, sure, but she’s also into drugs and Chinese medicine and mysticism.
I typically like my crime novels gritty, less about detection and more about character Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead manages to appease us all: the series-wanters, the character-seekers, and mystery-hounds. In addition to reinvigorating the idea of what a series could be, Gran also discarded the mold of the private detective novel, shaping her clay into something new. If it wasn’t Hoke Moseley, I wasn’t sure I wanted anything to do with it. I won’t say I’d written off all series, but I’d certainly soured on some (even ones I’d once found appealing) and on the concept as a whole. I came to that book expecting good things because I liked all of Sara Gran’s previous work ( Dope, Come Closer, Saturn’s Return to New York), but - as someone who had grown tired of crime writers being pushed to create a series character - I was also ambivalent. WE FIRST MET PRIVATE detective Claire DeWitt in 2011’s Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead.
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