![]() ![]() By following he seems to mean: giving yourself up to the flow so you can see the bigger picture. She is guided in this by a book called “Détection” by Cillette, a French criminologist who has a very out-there view of what detection is.įor Cillette, detection is about following clues to find the truth. More than a year after Katrina, Claire is investigating the disappearance and possible death of a wealthy District Attorney in New Orleans during the storm. ![]() I was reading something that seemed to be the lovechild of Raymond Chandler and Jean-Paul Satre.Ĭlaire Dewitt, a PI who makes Philip Marlowe seem like a romantic softy with a tendency to take things too literally, solves cases, sorry, mysteries, by using a kind of muscular mysticism that is stretched tight over a skeleton of existential panic with grief as its marrow. I knew what was happening but I’d started to understand that that was the answer to a different question. Two hours into it, I had no idea what it was about. I entered it expecting a whodunnit mystery with some local New Orleans colour and a clever plot. ![]() It’s a book that invites the reader to look beyond the narrative and ask themselves questions about mysteries: our ability to see them, our willingness to solve them and how we continue on day by day while the truth of our own lives constantly slips through our fingers. “Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead” is an extraordinary book: fascinating, rewarding, often upsetting but really hard to describe. ![]()
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