(The first book in the series, "Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead" was set in post-Katrina New Orleans.) When she was a girl growing up in Brooklyn, Claire and two friends found a book under enigmatic circumstances. Gran's "Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway" is the second Claire DeWitt novel, set in San Francisco, the city of Dashiell Hammett, where Claire lives and works. Claire, or another PI much like her, might have been inevitable - or maybe it just takes a writer as good as Sara Gran to make her seem that way. Perhaps it was only a matter of time until a sleuth came along whose expertise was essentially irrational.Ĭlaire 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 and under the influence of mind-altering substances. This makes the hard-boiled detective novel one of the more mystically disposed genres, as unlikely as that may sound to the casual observer. People meet, actions are taken and a vast machinery is set in motion, the characters carried along by it more or less against their wills. Fate, dark and implacable, has always played a role in noir fiction.
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