Claire DeWitt Mysteries

Claire DeWitt is not your average private investigator. She has brilliant skills of deduction and is an ace at discovering evidence. But Claire also uses her dreams, omens, and mind-expanding herbs to help her solve mysteries, and relies on Dtectionthe only book published by the great and mysterious French detective Jacques Silette before his death. The tattooed, pot-smoking Claire has just arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans, the city she's avoided since her mentor, Silette's student Constance Darling, was murdered there. Claire is investigating the disappearance of Vic Willing, a prosecutor known for winning convictions in a homicide-plagued city. Has an angry criminal enacted revenge on Vic? Or did he use the storm as means to disappear? Claire follows the clues, finding old friends and making new enemiesforemost among them Andray Fairview, a young gang member who just might hold the key to the mystery.

When Paul Casablancas, Claire DeWitt's ex-boyfriend and a popular musician in the Bay Area scene, is found dead in his apartment, his cherished guitars missing, the police are convinced it's a simple robbery. But Claire knows that nothing is ever simple. With the help of her new assistant Claude, Claire follows the clues, finding hints to Paul's fate in her other cases--especially a long-ago missing girl in New York's gritty East Village and a modern-day miniature horse theft in Marin. As visions of the past reveal the secrets of the present, Claire begins to understand the words of the enigmatic French detective Jacques Silette: The detective won't know what he is capable of until he encounters a mystery that pierces his own heart. And love, in all its forms, is the greatest mystery of all--at least to the world's greatest P.I. With a heroine hailed as a charmer (New York Times Book Review), from an author who reminds me why I fell in love with the genre (Laura Lippman), this is an addictive new adventure for an irresistible detective.

The Claire DeWitt series returns with a thrilling, noirish knockout of a novel that follows three separate narratives starring the self-proclaimed 'world's greatest detective.' As Cara Hoffman, author of Running, says, this 'is a hard-boiled, existential masterpiece.' Claire DeWitt, the world's best private detective, wakes up one dark night in an ambulance in Oakland: someone has just tried to murder her. But she's not dead. Not yet. More sure of herself than of the police, Claire follows the clues on a 52-hour odyssey through shimmering Las Vegas and the shabby surrounding desert to find out who wants her dead. But in order to save herself, Claire will have to revisit her own complicated past as she navigates the present: a past of childhood obsessions, rival detectives, lost friends, and mysteries mostly-but not always-solved. Three intertwining stories illuminate three eras of Claire's life: her early years as an ambitious girl detective in Brooklyn (before it was gentrified), which ended when her best friend and partner in crime-solving disappeared; a case of an unexplained death in the art world of late-1990s Los Angeles, when, devastated by the demise of her mentor in New Orleans, Claire was forced to start again; and her current quest to save her own life from a determined assassin. As the connections between the stories come into focus, the truth becomes clear. But Claire, battered and bruised, will never quit her search for the answer to the biggest mystery of all: how can anyone survive in a world so clearly designed to break our hearts?