Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

Written by Sara Gran

Narrated by Carol Monda

When Paul Casablancas, Claire DeWitt#8217;s ex-boyfriend and a popular musician in the Bay Area scene is found dead in his apartment, his cherished guitars missing, the police are convinced it#8217;s a simple robbery. But Claire knows that nothing is ever simple. With the help of her new assistant Claude, Claire follows the clues, finding hints to Paul#8217;s fate in her other cases-especially a long-ago missing girl in New York#8217;s gritty East Village and a modern-day miniature horse theft in Marin. As visions of the past reveal the secrets of the present, Claire begins to understand the words of the enigmatic French detective Jacques Silette: #8220;The detective won#8217;t know what he is capable of until he encounters a mystery that pierces his own heart.#8221; And love, in all its forms, is the greatest mystery of all-at least to the world#8217;s greatest P.I.With a heroine hailed as #8220;a charmer#8221; (New York Times Book Review), from an author who #8220;reminds me why I fell in love with the genre#8221; (Laura Lippman), this is an addictive new adventure for an irresistible detective.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Jun 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781611742596

Sara Gran

Sara Gran is the author of Saturn’s Return to New York, Come Closer, Dope, as well as two previous novels featuring Claire DeWitt. Her work has been published in more than a dozen countries. Born in Brooklyn, Sara lived in New York City until 2004. She now lives in Los Angeles and has a successful career writing for television.

Reviews for Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway

[Anya · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Love this, original hard boiled and a flawed human. Please write more in the series!

[ldvoorberg · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Weird. Can you say she solved the murder when her assistant did most of the leg work, she used her connections to just keep probing witnesses, she is unethical in her detecting and spends most of the story doing drugs? Not to mention that most of the plot is moved forward via drug-i diced dream-revelations. An author can use that trick maybe once in a story, but not regularly. That is just week writing in my opinion. Dreams might reveal important info in real life, but in a written narrative it is just too construed to feel real.
The ongoing subplot of the past mystery memory felt unconnected to the current mystery. Maybe I would have been more invested if I had read the first book, but I didn't and I won't. Not worth it.

[pjohanneson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hilarious, heartbreaking, and unlike any detective novel I've read before. Well, except Claire DeWitt's previous outing, of course.

[datrappert · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

First, let me say that I listened to the audiobook version, and narrator Carol Monda is fantastic. Frankly, if I were reading this, I might have just stopped. It isn't that Gran doesn't write well--she does. It's just that she goes on and on. She seems to be one of those writers so in love with her own style and wanting to express opinions about everybody and everything that she doesn't know when to rein things in a bit so that the work improves. Claire DeWitt hits rock bottom here, consuming more cocaine than anyone I have seen since Al Pacino's Scarface, stealing drugs out of every medical cabinet she has access to, having casual sex with men and women, and pretty much just not giving a damn. Of course, she has a bit of an excuse. An old lover, Paul, has been murdered. After abandoning him, Claire had actually introduced him to the woman he married. And now, well now, I guess she realizes he was the one. At the same time, we have ongoing flashbacks to the disappearance of her childhood friend and fellow young detective, Tracy, and to the missing person case that she and Tracy solved in New York many years before. Both mysteries involve running around a lot, drinking and taking drugs, and interviewing a lot of people in a lot of places, giving Gran a chance to write about as much stuff as possible. If you break them down, neither is a particularly good mystery, and the pleasure comes more from the personalities and settings than the mystery. This was true in the first Claire DeWitt novel, but the post-Katrina New Orleans setting and the scope of the story worked much better than similar elements do in this bloated sequel. And to make it worse, things end on a cliffhanger--not concerning the two mysteries that are solved, but on the one (I presume) yet to come. The only thing that would draw me to that one is Ms. Monda's wonderful narration--not Gran's out of control stylistics.

[xirxe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dass in Ermittlerkreisen, bevorzugt aus den nördlichen Gefilden, gehäuft psychische Probleme auftreten, ist man ja schon gewohnt (Harry Hole, Carl Morck, Wallander...). Doch nun gesellt sich auch noch ein weibliches Wesen aus dem sonnigen Kalifornien dazu - sollte das nicht eigentlich ein Garant für ein heiteres Gemüt sein? Bei Claire de Witt trifft das jedoch bestimmt nicht zu.
Claire de Witt ist sicherlich die zur Zeit lebensmüdeste Ermittlerin, die man in einem Krimi findet. Ihre Ermittlungsmethoden sind meist überaus unkonventionell (ab und an nimmt sie aber auch nach alt hergebrachter Art Fingerabdrücke), da sie sich eher auf Intuition, Gefühle, Träume und dergleichen mehr verlässt als auf simple Fakten. Sie scheint ein besonders sensibler Mensch zu sein, dem sich die bisher erlebten Dinge und Erfahrungen wie ein Schreckgespenst auf die Seele legen. Um diese Schmerzen, die Verlustängste und die Überzeugung, dass sie gänzlich ungeliebt ist, zu bekämpfen bzw. sie zu betäuben, nimmt sie alles zu sich, was sie an Drogen in die Finger bekommt. Und beim aktuellen Fall wird der Schmerz schier unerträglich, denn ihre frühere Liebe Paul ist getötet worden. Das Einzige, was sie noch für ihn tun kann, ist den Täter zu finden.
Es werden parallel zwei Fälle erzählt: Einmal die Suche nach Pauls Mörder, zum anderen die Geschichte einer ihrer ersten Fälle. Wie sie zusammen mit ihrer Freundin Tracy auf der Suche nach einer vermissten Bekannten war, die sich scheinbar ohne Anlass zugrunde richten wollte.
Eigentlich sind die Fälle fast (aber nur fast) eine Randerscheinung neben dem Einblick in die gebrochene Seele Claires. Spannend ist es trotzdem, denn man kommt ihr so nahe, dass man unbedingt wissen möchte, ob es ihr noch gelingt, die Lösung zu finden bevor sie endgültig zusammenklappt. Und hofft, dass sie aller Wahrscheinlichkeit zum Trotz, doch noch davonkommt.
Fazit: Wer einen 'normalen' Krimi/Thriller lesen möchte mit logischen Schlüssen und evtl. Action, wird mit diesem wohl nicht glücklich werden. Das Ganze ist mehr ein Psychogramm mit einer Krimigeschichte als Beilage, dieses dafür aber heftig und durchaus packend.

[drled_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Synopsis: One of Claire DeWitt's oldest friends has been murdered and she has decided to find out who actually committed the crime. As she delves into it, she flashes back to a case on which she and Tracy worked. She also continues to try to find out what happened to Tracy.Review: A depression ridden coke addict is stumbling along to solve crimes and although the mysteries are interesting, the main character is tedious. I don't really care whether she has died in the last chapter or not. This is probably my last Sara Gran book.

[storeetllr · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Second in the series of dark, philosophical mysteries featuring Claire DeWitt, a coke-snorting, sexually dysfunctional, socially misfit detective of the Silletian school. I loved the first book in the series, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead. It too was dark, though Claire wasn't as wasted throughout that one as she is in this one. It was hard to read about her addiction ~ the nosebleeds, the inability to get off the floor, the thieving of prescription drugs from friends and one-night stands, the skeevy people she bought drugs from and did drugs with ~ but, in a way, it all made sense since she was investigating the murder of her ex-lover, the one man she might have made a good life with had she not been so completely relationship phobic. Not a lot of gore, but violence of the self-inflicted kind and jumping back and forth through time to the first mystery she solved, doesn't make this an easy read, but the writing and the depth makes the effort worthwhile.

[maneekuhi · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

"...Bohemian Highway" (BH) is the second DeWitt novel from Sara Gran. I got into this series when I read a very favorable review for BH a couple of months ago. I decided to read the debut book, "Claire DeWitt and the Ciy of the Dead" first though, enjoyed it, rating it a 5.0 So I had very high expectations for BH, and I was rather disappointed. Claire is at best in her late 30's, a private detective working out of San Francisco, and the story begins shortly before the murder of an ex boyfriend of Claire's. Paul was shot dead in his home during what was assumed to be a burglary. Paul's widow, the drop dead gorgeous Lydia, is distraught but Paul's sister is suspicious of Lydia and hires Claire to solve the crime. And there's a subplot, which gets almost as many pages as the main storyline, and in my humble opinion, is a bit more interesting. When Claire was in her teens and living in Brooklyn, her good friend Tracy suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again. The subplot deals with the disappearance not of Tracy, but of their mutual friend Chloe. The story jumps back and forth between the 20+ year span between the two cases. Just to make sure you are paying attention, sometimes Claire might fall asleep in San Fran at the end of a chapter only to wake up in Brooklyn at the very beginning of the next sentence - no, there is no time travel involved.I thought the book was a bit confusing and tried a bit too hard to be a little bit deep. I have no idea who was driving the other car on the last page, and by then I didn't really care. But the biggest turn-off for me was the drugs. Claire is big into drugs and pills and occasionally booze in both cases, though a good deal worse in the current case. Claire snorts an awful lot of coke - enough to make her nose bleed. And she steals pills from the bathrooms of everyone she visits. Think dirty bathrooms in dingy bars, think interviews in alleyways, smelly people including herself and friends, jumbled thoughts and narration, self-made tattoos, vomit. Enough already. Claire says she wants to come clean, maybe that's book 3 or 4. But I don't care that much about Claire and I'm not that interested and will not likely read another in this series.

[shelleyraec · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was intrigued by the first book of this series, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, describing it in my review as “a slightly surreal, complex novel that is not just about the mystery of the missing… but also explores life’s larger mysteries, those of self, purpose and fate.” This novel is no different but I found I was less patient with Claire’s idiosyncrasies as she wandered around snorting coke waiting for the answers to the mystery of her ex boyfriends murder to find her as dictated by her ‘bible’, ‘Détection’. The plot wavers in favour of eccentricity and I found my attention waning, with the secondary case – a recall of one of Claire DeWitt’s first cases as a teenager- just barely sustaining interest. Though the writing is quite stunning and I admired some of the unique elements of character this literary crime novel was sadly a bit of a slog for me.

[foodairbooks · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed the first one enough to read this, which was not good at all. My sense was that the author deeply, deeply missed her coke-snorting days. I never liked cocaine, so this book bored me. I did finish it, but the mystery was a disappointment, too. I won't be reading Sara Gran again.

[beamis12 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Did not like this one as much as the first one. I still like the character but combining stories from her past with the murder she is trying to solve in the present was just too confusing. There was just way to much going on, my brain was on overdrive just trying to short out what was happening when and what it all meant. Will try her next one because I think this is an original series with an interesting character.

[rayaowen · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Plot and excellent writing just can't override the tedium of the protagonist's constant self-destructive drug abuse. I found it tough to finish this one and having read two, I won't attempt a third.

[edgoldberg · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

When I reviewed Sara Gran’s previous book, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, I described the main character as: “She’s rough, tattooed, pot smoking, gritty and unorthodox.” Well, in Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, she’s graduated to a full fledged drug addict, constantly snorting coke, popping pills and drinking. The constant references to these activities detracts from what could have been a really good book.Having moved from New Orleans in the first book to San Francisco in the second, Claire is trying to find out who killed her friend Paul, someone she’d been with before she relocated suddenly to Peru. Knowing Claire you’d realize that relationships are not her thing and she and Paul were getting too close for her comfort level. During her stay abroad, Paul started going out with Lydia, who he ultimately married. Along with Paul found shot to death in his den, it was discovered that several of his guitars were missing. And the search begins.Along with this storyline are flashbacks to Claire’s teen life in Brooklyn, NY where she, Tracy and Kelly were detectives. One day, Tracy disappeared and has not been heard of since. Kelly has never given up trying to find her and occasionally Claire or Kelly uncover clues as to Tracy’s whereabouts.Lastly, Claire reminisces about a case that she and Tracy worked on, the disappearance of their friend Chloe.I really like the way Sara Gran writes. The interweaving of current and past are done artfully. The plot is interesting and the characters are so in keeping with Claire’s lifestyle. Her references to Jacques Silette, the greatest detective ever, continuing from her previous book, add an unusual element. I would have loved to read his book, Detection, if it existed. It would be a mind blower.But, if you added all the drug/alcholol references in the book together, I’d estimate that they make up 25-50 of the slim 280 pages. A little too much, in my opinion. We know Claire is like no other detective. That’s she’s pretty screwed up emotionally. And we still love her. No need to dwell on drugs.

[jaylia3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The first Claire DeWitt book took place in post-Katrina New Orleans, but here she’s back home in the San Francisco area and the case is personal, her musician ex-boyfriend Paul has been murdered. Paul’s rich sister thinks his wife is guilty and wants to hire Claire to prove it, but Claire won’t take money for this investigation. Truth is an almost holy compulsion for her and she wants to go where the clues lead her. Claire’s methods are the same as before. She follows every clue, no matter how inconsequential or obscure, to its endpoint. Her deliberations are guided by dreams, Eastern philosophies, the precepts of French detective Jacques Silette, and large quantities of cocaine, mind altering prescription drugs and alcohol. Claire’s current case has connections with one from her teenage years in New York when she and her friend Tracy searched for a missing girl, and those older events are interspersed with her present day investigations. Then and now Claire’s methods are definitely not standard procedure, and she’s not above lying or stealing drugs from friends. It’s a dark, rich narrative, with an unsettling but compelling voice and layers of stories within stories that I find hard to turn away from.