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The infinite blacktop : a novel / Sara Gran.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Atria Books, 2018Edition: First Atria Books hardcover editionDescription: 290 pages ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781501165719
  • 1501165712
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Summary: Claire DeWitt, the hard-living and tough-talking private investigator, has always been something of a detective. As 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. The three solved many cases together and were inseparable--until the day Tracy vanished without a trace. That is still the only case Claire ever failed to solve. 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. She hunts for the real story behind the death of a washed-up painter ten years earlier, whose successful and widely admired artist girlfriend had died a few months before him. Today, Claire is on her way to Las Vegas from San Francisco when she's almost killed by a homicidal driver. 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. As these three narratives converge, some mysteries are solved and others continue to haunt. But 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?
Fiction notes: Click to open in new window
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Vol info Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library Mystery Gran, Sara CD 3 Available 33111009249554
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Named one of the best books of 2018 by NPR

The "delicious and addictive" ( Salon ) Claire DeWitt series returns with a thrilling, noirish knockout of a novel that follows three separate narratives starring the self-proclaimed "world's greatest detective." As Cara Hoffman, author of Running , says, this "is a hard-boiled, existential masterpiece."

Claire DeWitt, the world's best private detective, wakes up one dark night in an ambulance in Oakland: someone has just tried to murder her. But she's not dead. Not yet.

More sure of herself than of the police, Claire follows the clues on a 52-hour odyssey through shimmering Las Vegas and the shabby surrounding desert to find out who wants her dead. But in order to save herself, Claire will have to revisit her own complicated past as she navigates the present: a past of childhood obsessions, rival detectives, lost friends, and mysteries mostly--but not always--solved.

Three intertwining stories illuminate three eras of Claire's life: her early years as an ambitious girl detective in Brooklyn (before it was gentrified), which ended when her best friend and partner in crime-solving disappeared; a case of an unexplained death in the art world of late-1990s Los Angeles, when, devastated by the demise of her mentor in New Orleans, Claire was forced to start again; and her current quest to save her own life from a determined assassin.

As the connections between the stories come into focus, the truth becomes clear. But Claire, battered and bruised, will never quit her search for the answer to the biggest mystery of all: how can anyone survive in a world so clearly designed to break our hearts?

Claire DeWitt, the hard-living and tough-talking private investigator, has always been something of a detective. As 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. The three solved many cases together and were inseparable--until the day Tracy vanished without a trace. That is still the only case Claire ever failed to solve. 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. She hunts for the real story behind the death of a washed-up painter ten years earlier, whose successful and widely admired artist girlfriend had died a few months before him. Today, Claire is on her way to Las Vegas from San Francisco when she's almost killed by a homicidal driver. 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. As these three narratives converge, some mysteries are solved and others continue to haunt. But 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?

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