09 Jun 2011 05:18:03
"The client already knows the solution to his mystery," Claire declares. "But he doesn't want to know. He doesn't hire the detective to solve his mystery. He hires a detective to prove that his mystery can't be solved."
The opening of the novel, the first in a new series by Sara Gran, finds Claire closing in on 40 and recovering from a nervous breakdown. She is a devotee of dead French Detective Jacques Silette, author of "Detection," a strange and obscure book she discovered in childhood. Silette's book is filled with lines like this: "The detective will never be thanked for revealing the truth. He will be despised, doubted, abhorred, spat upon. ... His only reward will be the awful, unbearable truth itself."
Claire carries the book everywhere, the way some people carry the Bible. Sometimes Silette speaks to her in dreams.
Hired by a client whose uncle, a Louisiana prosecutor, disappeared in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Claire reluctantly returns to New Orleans, one of the many cities where she once lived. Gran, a resident of New Orleans when the hurricane struck, paints a grim portrait of the city, one she believes was ruined not just by wind and water but also by violence and the rot of corruption.
"People kill each other everywhere," Claire says. "The difference was that in New Orleans, no one tried to stop them."
As she works her missing person case, she sifts through files and interrogates sources, including bums and murderous street toughs; but she gets most of her clues from intuition, omens and drug-induced dreams.
She is also a tough customer. "I'd shot four people," she confides. "I'd killed two. None were in self-defense."
The novel, Gran's fourth, is difficult to categorize, offering a strangely appealing mix of the mystical and the hard-boiled. The book is beautifully written in a tight, quirky style that distinguishes Gran as one of the more original writers working today.
The story is bleak. Every character, including the heroine, is drowning in sadness, and several of them caution the reader not to expect a happy ending.
