Yet another print-on-demand book from bookshop.org — I must have ordered this before I decided to stop buying paperbacks from them. Or perhaps I forgot?
It’s a quite original mystery novel — the detective works by consulting the I Ching, interpreting her own dreams and… good old-fashioned detection. That sounds like it’s a comedic mystery, but it’s very much not. It’s a noir, I guess? It’s interesting, and it somehow manages to keep the tension up, even if nothing actually makes much sense.
But it’s also somewhat annoying in parts. While it’s a noir, it’s set in New Orleans, and Gran piles on the descriptions of New Orleans as a hellhole so high that it just starts feeling… odd? I know, I know, it’s a noir staple to paint whatever city a book is set in as a hellhole, but this really comes off as written by someone who detests New Orleans in particular, and I’m not quite sure that’s what the author intended.
It’s also teasing mysteries in the protagonist’s backstory a lot — we spend so many pages on that that the main mystery suffers. I assume that’s because those other mysteries are going to be further worked on in the later books in this series, but as I’m not sure I want to read those, that just felt like a waste of time to me.
But I mean — it’s well written. I was entertained while reading it.
Heh… quite steep drop-off in the number of ratings on Goodreads (which I take to mean that readership dropped steeply, too), which may explain why there’s only three books in the series.
Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2011) by Sara Gran (buy new, buy used, 3.7 on Goodreads)