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3***

“The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl. But truly he is investigating something else altogether, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Sureness will always elude you. The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole. We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it.��

Claire DeWitt, one of the more unusual PI's I've come across in literature, is set the task of finding a missing man after the storm in New Orleans. Claire DeWitt is definitely not your typical PI; tattoo's, consumption of a lot of alcohol, smoking weed-she takes no nonsense from anybody. Armed with her copy of a book called "Detection" by a famous Detective called Silette, and knowledge developed from her old mentor, Constance, she investigates crimes.

I found that this book didn't flow as smoothly as I hoped. The parts that did flow smoothly was between showing her past, with the disappearance of her friend Tracey, and the present, the investigation and solving of the case of the missing Vic Willing. The parts that were difficult to separate were to determine what were her imagination/visions (due to being in a drug induced state) and what was reality.

Some parts of DeWitt's character I particularly liked and I found a believable PI- I liked the fact she was rather snarky. However, some parts of the book I didn't fully understand, for example, her heavy reliance and belief from tea drinking and I Ching coins. Some of the clues seemed so far-fetched as well and everything, to me, seemed to fit and coincidences occurred almost 'too nicely'. DeWitt's character is shrouded in things that happened in her past, things that we touch upon but we do not go into detail- leaving many questions unanswered.

However, I did enjoy the author's ability to give the city of New Orleans character after Hurricane Katrina. I come from another country and was very young when this occurred so I do not remember much, but it was interesting to see how a place is devastatingly effected by this and the people in it. Sara Green does brilliantly when describing the heavily stricken places and the poverty of it's patrons, the heavy gun violence and gang violence and affiliations of the streets of New Orleans.

Overall this was a good novel to read for private investigating. Claire DeWitt was an interesting and snarky character, even though I did not understand or fully appreciate her reliance on 'psychic' methods for clues. A lot of the clues seemed like massive coincidences that fitted just a little too nicely for me and isn't how detective work is usually portrayed (e.g. hard work and really trying hard to seek the truth).