Two years ago, Josephine Flannigan left the streets and the drugs behind and has since tried to pull her life together by living an honest life and stealing from jewelry store to finance all that. Then a rich couple asks her to find their missing daughter, who has probably dropped into the scene that Flannigan has said goodbye all those years ago. And they’re willing to pay her a grand to boot. So it's back to the streets for Joey, back to the backstabbers, back the addicts and back to the dope.

On the back sleeve, it says ‘Dope’ takes place in 1950’s New York. Yet, in the book itself, it’s hardly ever clear against which background in needs to be placed. It could be a way of writer Sara Gran to prove that topics like drugs, prostitution, crime and child abuse are problems of the ages. Scenic descriptions and backgrounds are sparse; ‘Dope’ is a narrative-driven story, and it’s especially the modern, contemporary sounding dialogue that clashes against the idea that this should take place well over half a century ago.

The plot itself contains nothing new. Joey tours from one end of the city to the other side, trying to find the missing daughter and stumbling over scheming characters and dead-ends in her search. Only twenty pages before the ending, Gran is able to surprise us with some twists that really matter.
What makes this story stand out from other detective tales is the fact that it only focuses on the losers in its society. Sure, we’ve seen junkies and hoodlums in tales by Chandler and Hammett; but with Gran, they’re everywhere. During several occasions, the plot has to make a brake for one of the characters to jab a needle in their arms or snort some coke. The main protagonist, despite proclaiming she’s clean as a whistle, isn’t the noble woman, desperately fighting for good. She gets the itches whenever she’s around other users and steals to make a living. Nobody else seems to live an easy life either and hoping for a better future means one knows it’s going to be a struggle to get there. In that way, it doesn’t matter in what era ‘Dope’ takes place. Every generation can relate to such matters.