Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (Claire DeWitt Mysteries #1)

by Sara Gran

“If life gave you answers outright, they would be meaningless. Each detective must take her clues and solve her mysteries for herself. No one can solve your mystery for you; a book cannot tell you the way.”

I’d forgotten that in New Orleans every block was its own world; block by block was how locals described their city, good and bad.

Once you know the truth, there are no second chances. No do-overs, no changing your mind, no turning back. The door shuts behind you, and locks.

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.”

It doesn’t matter what people want to hear. It doesn’t matter if people like you. It doesn’t matter if the whole world thinks you’re crazy. It doesn’t matter whose heart you break. What matters is the truth.

In most cities I wouldn’t have worried about it much—we white ladies are pretty safe if we stick to our own neighborhoods, the beneficiaries of generations of racism whether we want it or not.

“My uncle, he used to say there was two Bibles,” he said. “Or one, but it been split in half. He said half’s in the book, on paper. But the other half is inside people. You born with it, but it’s up to you to find out. You gotta learn to see it for yourself. That’s the only way.”

I went to a bookstore, where I spent an hour looking at crime novels and picked up a copy of Jamal Verdigris’s Advanced Techniques in Locksmithing, a steal at two hundred and fifty.

“Please,” Mick said. “They’ve been dying to get their hands on this city. Did you see the plans? The plans they made? You can get them on the Internet. They got plans for the whole city, all divied up. Fucking Trump is talking about a deal on Canal Street. Fucking Donald Trump.”

“This world was supposed to be paradise,” she told me once, biting into an apple at her big kitchen table. “If people would wake up, it still could be.”

THE HARDEST THING about buying a gun in Louisiana was that there were so many options I hardly knew where to begin.

“The thing about this city,” Andray said. “It knows how to tell a beautiful story. It truly does. But if you’re looking for a happy ending, you better be lookin’ somewhere else.”

‘Be grateful for every scar life inflicts on you.’ He says, ‘Where we’re unhurt is where we are false. Where we’re wounded and healed is where our real self gets to show itself.’ That’s where you get to show who you are.”

Despite blond hair and blue eyes, Tracy was not a marketable victim.

We all gonna get our recompense, but people like us, people who take on burdens, we gonna get to sit by his side. He promised me that.”

“If you hoping for a happy ending, DeWitt, you lookin’ in the wrong city.”

“‘Consider the possibility,’” I said, quoting Silette, “‘that what we perceive as the future has already happened, and intuition is only a very good memory.’”