Book – Claire DeWitt & The Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran

Shane | 8 August 2013 | Reply

Faber/Allen & Unwin, rrp $29.99
1 August 2013
Reviewed by Shane Pinnegar
9/10

In Sara Gran’s second novel featuring the wholly unique private investigator Claire DeWitt, her heroine slides down a dark spiral of the soul as she attempts to discover the murderer of her guitarist friend and former lover, Paul Casablancas.

Set against the pulsating backdrop of the San Francisco indie rock scene and intertwining deftly with another mystery from her teenage years featuring New York punk and S&M, the resourceful DeWitt faces down her own demons and, just as they threaten to overpower her, discovers that she has more support than she could have realised.

Gran has a unique voice and has crafted a wonderfully quirky story, and in DeWitt a fascinating, flawed and funky heroine. As well as the two intertwined cases from both present and past, Gran also weaves in DeWitt’s relationship with the French author of a book called Detection, a master investigator who dies long before she was born, but who, through his words, steered her towards her life’s work with quotes such as “The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl but truly he is investigating something else all together, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Mush of your life will be spent in the dark woods, no path visible, with fear and loneliness your only companions.”

The novel works as a stand-alone story – this reviewer hasn’t seen the first book in the series, Claire DeWitt And The City Of The Dead – and the characters very quickly entice and bore into the reader, ensuring the book is hard to put down.

DeWitt does, of course, emerge from the Bohemian Highway she almost lost herself on and solve the Case Of The Kali Yuga – and that of The Missing Miniature Horses – and the book closes with a cliffhanger which will leave her ever-growing legion of fans excited for her next case.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sara-Gran/117644814923521