Clare DeWitt and the City of the Dead by Sarah Gran (Audiobook Review)

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Title: Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead
Author: Sara Gran
Narrator: Carol Monda
Copyright: 2011, HighBridge Audio
Duration: 8 hours, 40 minutes
Genres: mystery, murder, thriller
Filed in: Audiobook Reviews
Review copy provided by HighBridge Audio.

PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY: Claire DeWitt is not your average private investigator. She has brilliant skills of deduction and is an ace at discovering evidence. But Claire also uses her dreams, omens, and mind-expanding herbs to help her solve mysteries, and relies on Détection—the only book published by the great and mysterious French detective Jacques Silette before his death.
The tattooed, pot-smoking Claire has just arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans, the city she’s avoided since her mentor, Silette’s student Constance Darling, was murdered there. Claire is investigating the disappearance of Vic Willing, a prosecutor known for winning convictions in a homicide-plagued city. Has an angry criminal enacted revenge on Vic? Or did he use the storm as means to disappear? Claire follows the clues, finding old friends and making new enemies—foremost among them Andray Fairview, a young gang member who just might hold the key to the mystery.
©2011 Original material by Sara Gran. (P)2011 HighBridge Company

AUDIOBOOK REVIEW: Now, I don’t typically go for murder mysteries, it’s definitely not my favorite genre to read from. Having said that, I admit that I liked Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead a lot. Claire DeWitt is a strong character who is immediately likeable. I don’t know if Claire is beautiful, Sara Gran doesn’t go into a lot of detail on what Claire looks like, intentionally, I believe, so that the reader doesn’t fixate on Claire’s physical appearance, but she is brainy and tough. More than that, she has an uncanny intuition, never missing a clue, and always paying special attention to facial expressions and body language. And I especially like how some of Claire’s most important clues come to her in dreams.
Most interesting about Claire DeWitt, is her own mysterious past. Throughout the audiobook, Sara Gran gives us bits and pieces of Claire’s past, never really satisfying our curiosity, but always leaving us hungry for more. We learn right away that, although she grew up in Brooklyn, and currently lives in California, New Orleans is familiar to her. Gran hints that Claire may be returning to New Orleans not only to solve a mystery, but to tie up some loose ends in her own life. We also learn, gradually, of Claire’s youth, and her two best friends who were really more like sisters to her. Gran alludes to some unnamed tragedy that left one of the girls missing, and the other no longer a friend at all, and it’s clear that Claire is still traumatized by whatever happened. Gran keeps the suspense building steadily toward the devastating climax.
This story takes place in New Orleans, a bit of a cliché for murder mysteries, but this is a post-Katrina New Orleans. Sara Gran spends a lot of time describing the state of the city, just two years after “the storm”; entire neighborhoods of crumbling, abandoned homes, residents who are still a bit shell-shocked, and the ever increasing crime-rate, bad before but totally out of control now. I believe that this is the real point ofClaire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. There’s a mystery to be solved, sure, but I really think Gran wrote this book about the city and its people, old and steeped in tradition, but now just a city of the dead. Gran writes some beautifully poignant passages, like this one:
Some people, I saw, had drowned right away, and some people were drowning in slow motion, drowning a little bit at a time, and would be drowning for years. And some people, like Mick, had always been drowning, they just didn’t know what to call it until now.
Narrator Carol Monda took me a little bit by surprise. When I read the description of Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, I pictured Claire as a kind of trash-talking punk rocker, and maybe a little bit of an airhead. The voice provided by Monda was much more mature than that, and once I got used to it I found it to be entirely appropriate, lending an air of credibility to Claire that I hadn’t expected. Yes, I’d say Carol Monda fit the character very nicely.
Like I said, I don’t usually like murder mysteries very much, but I’m glad I took a chance on Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found, and I’m anxious to look for more audiobooks by Sara Gran.

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If you like this audiobook review, you can purchase the audiobook here:
Get “Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead” by Sara Gran (Unabridged Audiobook from HighBridge Audio.

This audiobook review is based on the unabridged audiobook.
Audiobook review by Steven Brandt
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