She declines to interview Vic’s friends, the enemies Leon has helpfully listed, the police detectives who worked the case or even the street man who claims he saw Vic after the worst of the flooding. Claire’s approach to sleuthing is as Zen-like as Silette’s. What’s remarkable is that he sticks with her as long as he does before firing her. Since Constance and Silette are both unavailable, it’s no wonder that Leon Salvatore wants Claire to find his uncle, New Orleans ADA Vic Willing, two years after he vanished. In a haze of drugs and injuries, she struggles off the scene, determined to find her would-be killer’s identity but the list of people who would be happy to see her dead is not a short one.A Brooklyn private investigator who freely admits that she’s the best in the world goes looking for a man swallowed up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.Īctually, Claire DeWitt was trained by two detectives even better than her: her mentor Constance Darling, whose murder made Claire the best in the business, and Constance’s ex-teacher and ex-lover Jacques Silette, whose cult reputation as the author of the classic manual Détection didn’t help recover his kidnapped daughter. Today, Claire is on her way to Las Vegas when she’s almost killed by a homicidal driver. She hunts for the real story behind the death of a washed-up painter ten years earlier, whose successful, widely admired artist girlfriend had died a few months before him. Later, in her twenties, Claire is in Los Angeles trying to get her PI license by taking on a cold case that has stumped the LAPD.

That is still the only case Claire ever failed to solve.

The three were inseparable-until the day Tracy vanished without a trace.

They solved many cases together, in the process witnessing human behavior at its worst. Claire DeWitt, the hard-living and tough-talking private investigator, has always been something of a detective.Īs a young girl growing up in Brooklyn, Claire and her two best friends, Tracy and Kelly, fell under the spell of the book Detection by legendary French detective Jacques Silette.

City of the dead sara gran