The Infinite Blacktop
A Novel
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- USD 2.99
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- USD 2.99
Descripción editorial
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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of Gran's bold and stunning third novel featuring PI Claire DeWitt (after 2013's Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway), Claire is headed for Las Vegas, Nev., in 2011 when she's nearly killed by a crazed driver in Oakland, Calif. She manages to limp away from the scene, wondering who would have wanted to kill her. Flash back to Brooklyn in 1985, when Claire was the world's greatest teenage detective. As a devotee of Jacques Silette, the French author of an obscure book called D tection, she and best friends Tracy and Kelly solved many cases. That same year Tracy vanished without a trace, and her disappearance has haunted Claire ever since. Back in 2011, Claire has discovered a lead in Las Vegas involving a rare comic book that may hold the key to what happened to Tracy. In a third narrative strand, set in Los Angeles in 1999, the 20-something Claire, who needs hours to earn her PI license, takes on a cold case involving the strange deaths of two artists. Mixing classic tropes of teen detective fiction with elements of eastern philosophy and a profound sense of the absurd, Gran takes readers on an unforgettable journey.
