I am a huge fan of Sara Gran's character Claire. She's smart, savvy, off-beat and always questioning, questioning.
And this, from the cover says it all - "Claire, battered and bruised, continues her search for the answer to the biggest mystery of all: what is the purpose of our lives, and how can anyone survive in a world so clearly designed to break our hearts again and again?"

I'm a huge Claire Dewitt fan. My favorite fictional detectives in order are Dewitt, Dirk Gently, Lionel Essrog (Motherless Brooklyn), Hank Palace (Last Policeman), Conrad Metcalf (Gun with Ocassional Music). This was the novel that I thought would answer all the questions about some of the mysteries of Claire's life. It uses narratives in 3 different time periods and does it well. You may not get the answers you want or all of them, but you will leave this book with a greater appreciation for Sara Gran and her wonderfully unconventional detective, Claire Dewitt.

This a great addictive series that I want never to end. Claire DeWitt is brilliant, edgy, hard boiled, funny and truely in a class by herself. Three mysteries three different time periods, some are solved some are not but it's the journey that makes it all worthwhile. A genre bending series that is not to be missed.

Who tried to kill Claire DeWitt in a hit and run? That's what Claire wants to find out but will there be anything left of her when she finds her would-be killer?

A funny thing happened a few days ago. I was driving to work, pondering when/if a new Claire DeWitt book would be coming out, only to find there was a Goodreads giveaway for the newest one AND it was up on Netgalley. Naturally, I was all over it.

Fresh from the events of Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, Claire DeWitt goes through the meat grinder yet again, subsisting on stolen drugs, grit, and shear stubbornness to find the man who tried to kill her. Claire is still Claire, the drug-doing, alcohol-drinking, ass-kicking, lying, detecting machine she's always been. She's a glorious melding of old-school locked room cozy detective heroines with the damaged goods detectives of noir fiction. The Infinite Blacktop is another one of her grand, quirky, funny, broken cases.

The book is told in three threads: one with Claire and her two teenage detective friends, Kelly and Tracy, one with Claire trying to earn her PI license while piecing together the events surrounding an artist's death, and the final one, Claire's search for the man who tried to run her down. Each thread is pretty bad ass and does a great job illustrating the journey of Claire DeWitt.

The artist thread was narrowly my favorite, showing how Claire got her IP license but also showing some vulnerability from her that she doesn't show anymore. The present day thread, with Claire barely hanging on, was nearly as interesting as the artist thread but I just wanted someone to tell Claire to slow down and maybe sleep for ten hours. Although, the world's greatest detective never slows down when she's on a case...

This book answers a lot of lingering questions from the two previous books, namely what happened to Tracy, why hasn't anyone else ever read the Cynthia Silverton books, and who left the copy of Detection, Silette's book, in the unused wing of the DeWitt home all those years ago. It was pretty satisfying conclusion to the previous two books, although I hope it isn't the last we've seen of Claire DeWitt.

I don't really know what else to say without spoiling things. Claire's Dirk Gently approach to detection is as great as it ever was. Much like the previous two books, this one was a darkly humorous, quirky, gritty train wreck.

As per the last two books, Claire just barely holds everything together while searching for her quarry, going on an odyssey of substance abuse and self-discovery while proving why she is the best detective in the world. I fucking loved it. If this is the last Claire DeWitt book, it's a hell of a high note to go out on. Five out of five stars.

Claire DeWitt is one of my very favorite detectives, ever, and I've met a lot of them. Gran is so deft at weaving three different timelines together. I would definitely recommend anything by Sara Gran to anyone, not just fans of the genre.