The Infinite Blacktop: A Claire DeWitt Novel

This is not your usual tyor of crime novel. It is gritty, grimy, dark and dangerous and the main character - private investigator Claire deWitt - has some rather evil and weird behaviours. There are three story lines which take place at various times in the protagonist’s life. Intertwined through the book, these stories, in places, can be hard to follow. The writing, however, is concise, and skips along nicely. In parts though things seems a bit far fetched, for example, the amount of pill popping, physical body damage, and lack of sleep seem pretty unrealistic and I found hard to believe. I did enjoy reading this book because it was well written and held my interest. A good escape read.

This is a most unusual book. A private detective reprises some of her successful cases while solving her latest murder. Her character is well formed but not pleasant. There does not seem to be much actual detection going on and the strands and twists and turns of the story between cases were difficult for me to follow.

I would not search for other titles by this author.

Claire DeWitt is the self-appointed “World’s Greatest Detective” who never, ever fails to solve a case. She is feisty, eccentric and extremely unpopular which causes a bit of a problem when it appears that somebody is trying to kill her as there are plenty of potential candidates. Clare goes underground to try and find the homicidal car driver and her quest leads her back to crimes that she solved in both her teenage years and at the start of her life as a PI. These three separate plot strands converge as the book progresses.

First of all, the good news. Although I had not read any others from the Clare deWitt series, it worked perfectly well as a stand-alone novel. That being said, I suspect additional background information may have enhanced my enjoyment of the book. It is also quirky, creative, unusual and inventive. On the whole it is also very readable and there is a complex storyline with a mystery to solve.

Unfortunately not all the news was good. Clare is such an odd, weird, unlikeable and eccentric detective that she didn’t come over as a believable character – not to me anyway. I also found the book quite disjointed because of the switches between storylines and timeframes. It was rather too complicated a plot for all this jumping around and I found myself getting very confused as to which timeframe we were in and which characters belonged to which storyline. There didn’t really seem to be a huge amount of detective work either, certainly nothing which stood out in terms of justifying Clare’s claim to be the “best detective in the world”. Finally, although Claire deWitt, the main character, is memorable (but not necessarily likeable), the supporting cast are less well developed and, in my view, eminently forgettable.

I had not read any Sarah Gran before and am not sure that I will be actively looking for more of her books. However, if one landed in my lap I would certainly give it a go.