Claire-obscure

By Billie Hinton

Lonely, unfulfilled, and envious of her best friend who has moved to Italy, Claire Caviness heads out to the same old club one night but takes a right turn out of her usual routine and meets Finn Weston, a mysterious and disturbed medical student who lures her into a folie a deux - a shared madness that forces Claire to look at the things she's tried desperately to leave behind. When Claire's friend Lucy is found dead and Finn is implicated in the murder, Raoul Duras, a Delta Force operator with a penchant for rescuing prostitutes, offers a way out of the madness. In a raw, edgy journey from trauma to restoration, Claire examines her deepest fears: grief for her distant mother and gay father, the awakening of her conflicted sexuality, and the darkness that pulls her to the intrigue and danger of two very different - and dangerous - men.

REVIEWS:

CRIME BOOK BEAT: Crime writers are generally like war correspondents, but Ms. Hinton doesn't require a flak jacket. Her writing is literate, evocative, and perceptive - even mesmerizing. Her mysteries aren't solved, they're dangled just ahead, just out of reach.

EIGHT CUTS GALLERY: I've come across some real gems on Kindle, and Billie Hinton's Claire-Obscure is one of the shiniest gems. What drew me to the book was the most primordial thing - the power of an image (and the beautiful title with its evocative double meaning), a cover that evokes the opening of Belle de Jour, and Renoir's painting Parapluies (my favourite in the whole world). I'm glad I was drawn because Billie Hinton is a wonderful writer, and Claire-Obscure a delightful, enigmatic masterpiece.

PRAISE FOR CLAIRE-OBSCURE:

"claire-obscure is sophisticated, eerie, fascinating, literary. It has a spare, sexy Duras feel and a Donna Tartt-like magnetic quality."-Peggy Payne, author of Revelation and New York Times Notable Book Sister India

"In claire-obscure, Billie Hinton creates three amazing and mysterious characters, in a fresh voice that has echoes of Donna Tartt and Sylvia Plath. Couldn't wait to see how it turned out, hated for it to end."-Dale Edgerton, author of Goneaway Road

"Simply brilliant; a lyric dreamsong."-J.S. Kindrick, former Special Operations soldier and author of Spirit Horses

• Language: English
• Publisher: Billie Hinton
• Release date: May 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452460888

Billie Hinton

Billie Hinton lives on a small horse farm with her husband, two teenagers, two horses, a painted pony, two miniature donkeys, six felines, two Corgis, and daily visits from wild creatures of all kinds. She sees magic happen every single day.

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Reviews for Claire-obscure

[iamindeed · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

as copied from my Amazon review
Obscure, perhaps far too much so ...

I picked up the book simply because it looked far different from the norm - and I was drawn to the title. It took me nearly 3 weeks to finish this book of 260 or so pages. A record slow read for me. It didn't excite me to read it, I found the characters to be rather self-absorbed and mired within that self-proclaimed obscurity. Sad, because the premise of a girl/woman with a general dissatisfaction in her life and no real impetus to make change is a great premise. But, while others will (and do I am sure) say that they got to know the characters "intimately", to me it felt like listening in on a therapy session. When they were all mixed up.

The writing is well crafted, I just didn't appreciate the skill as I couldn't connect at all with the story or the characters. The story was too choppy, as if we were being treated to a stop motion flip book into sections of her life: but it also didn't work for me as a memoir. I can't define where it fell apart for me, but perhaps it was that it felt like that book that you are assigned to read because "you should".

It certainly wasn't the book for me, I've tried twice to pick it up again and give it another read without success.