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Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt reads like hardboiled contemporary noir, it's dark and bleak and morally ambiguous at times with an intriguing central mystery and a compulsively readable private eye. It also shares genre tropes with those highly unbelievable cozy mysteries in which detectives are celebrated celebrities around the world known for solving cases such as The Murder on the Blue Train and The Jewels of Aunt Marjie. And then there's the child detective all grown up and living with failure and drug addiction - see the wonderful Boy Detective Fails perhaps? - plus the humour and investigative style of Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently who solves his cases through the interconnectedness of all things and you're coming close forming an idea of the wonderful and wilfully strange world of Claire DeWitt. It's such a fantastic melange of styles that will surely have literary noir fans squealing with joy and I can't wait to insist that my friend Ben reads this when he catches up on all the "required noir reading" I gave him. You can't rush James Crumley afterall.

This is a post-Katrina noir that spends as much time discussing the aftermath of that particular disaster as it does unravelling its plot, there's all sorts of post traumatic stress on display, questions raised over the failing of the infrastructure supposedly in place to provide aid and the desire of a city's people to recover plus it doubles as a tour guide in to a hell on Earth that America apparently has no interest in fixing. Sara Gran juggles all of these balls with consummate skill, flair and even a fair amount of humour despite the subject matter. If the world of literature was a fair place she would deserve all of the financial success of your common Gillian Flynn but alas at the moment she must survive with the adoration of the relative few.