Named one of the best books of 2018 by NPR The “delicious and addictive” (Salon) 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, … 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?
more
Sara Gran’s latest is a total delight. Infinite Blacktop is as captivating as it is unusual, an alchemical mixture of not one but three mysteries, scattered across time and America, all centered around the badass and deeply damaged Claire DeWitt, whose unconventional, unceasing, irrational mode of detection is like nothing else in crime fiction.
If you haven’t read Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt series, you’re in for a treat. These books are dark, twisty, mystical, and just…unusual in ways I can’t quite put my finger on. Claire DeWitt is a hot mess, and the suspense is always whether she will survive at all. What sets them apart is the way that Claire solves her mysteries with the help of obscure rare books and and a kind of almost supernatural intuition that places these books almost–but not quite–on the edge of fantasy. Her world is just a couple of degrees different from ours, and that fascinates me.
Although you could read this one without reading the previous novels, there is one long mystery at the heart of these novels that moves forward in the most intriguing ways in each new installment. Be prepared for a detective novel that blazes its own trail–these books are like nothing I’ve ever read, which is why I love them so much.
The only thing wrong with Gran’s writing is that she doesn’t write more books – I’ve loved everything she’s done and her latest addition to her Claire de Witt books is amazing. You should start with the first one, Claire de Wittet hooked and the city of death, and I defy you not to get hooked. That is if you like compelling stories and don’t mind a hero who is more than a little self destructive.
There’s a tiny moment in the middle of INFINITE BLACKTOP I liked so much that it made me stop reading, and ask myself why. Not just why do I love this passage, but why do I love fiction, why do I love reading, what’s reading fiction even for? These are not small questions to be elicited by a scene about a lunch shared by two imaginary people, who are meeting to discuss an imaginary crime, in a story that’s entirely imaginary. What the hell kind of thing is that to love? Someone else’s imaginary story?
I admit: I was asking myself these questions at four o’clock in the morning, when Big Questions can come bursting into the room like a SWAT team. And I write fiction for a living, so the subject isn’t merely academic; it’s a regular source of introspection—what do I love reading, and why?
Here’s the fundamental answer: I love feeling that I’m truly inhabiting another person. And the more strongly I can achieve that feeling—the more an author has created a character who’s so genuine that the real me feels like I AM that fictional person—the more I love it. A step or two further along the introspection scale, I ought to examine why it is that this is something I love to do, but that’s perhaps too metaphysical for a Goodreads review, and this one is already far too much about me, so I’ll get back this terrific book: it was a tremendous joy to inhabit this character, and to meet the other characters on her journey.
Sara Gran’s detective Claire DeWitt both stands firmly within the female sleuth tradition and outside it, staking out original and sometimes surreal ground. Every time one of these novels is published I know I’m in for a rare treat — The Infinite Blacktop is like falling into a dream you never wanted to leave in the first place.
Not conventional. Wonderful writing.
Sara Gran’s Infinite Blacktop is a hard-boiled, existential masterpiece. There’s no detective as skilled or as strange as Claire Dewitt; mouse-whisperer, slumming angel, gnostic disciple. She always wins the day. Sara Gran is simply peerless.
A marvel of a novel, one that combines the mysteries of seemingly unsolvable crimes and the deeper mysteries of the human heart. Written with both a vivid edge and heartfelt compassion, The Infinite Blacktop is one of the most exciting books of the year.