Sara Gran’s latest is bleak noir tale
Brooklyn BookBeat
“Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) just might be the bleakest noir tale since “Dope” (2006), and Sara Gran wrote that one, too. The New York-based author will appear in Brooklyn on July 2 to read from her book at DUMBO’s powerHouse Arena.
The novel is a sequel to “Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead” (2011), another dark yarn, but one leavened by an abundance of quirky characters and occasional flashes of humor. But there’s little to chuckle about in this new story that plunges every character into a pit of despair.
Claire, now in her 40s, is a devotee of a dead French detective named Jacques Silette, author of “Detection,” an obscure book she and her wild childhood friends discovered as teenagers in New York’s East Village. “The detective,” Silette said, “will never be thanked for revealing the truth. … His only reward will be the awful, unbearable truth itself.” The book inspired her to become the self-proclaimed world’s greatest detective — one who shuns forensic evidence in favor of odd clues, intuition, dreams and omens.
The novel’s central mystery is the murder of Paul Casablancas, a musician Claire once dated, abandoned out of fear of intimacy and still loves. But she remains obsessed with the long-ago, unsolved disappearance of one of her childhood friends and also takes on other cases including the unexplained deaths of a client’s miniature horses.