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

by Sara Gran

“Mysteries exist independently of us,” Silette wrote. “A mystery lives in the ether; it floats into our world on the wind like an umbrella and lands where gravity pulls it. And all the elements around it are now rearranged into the elements of a mystery: a tightly woven lace of clues and detectives, villains and victims. Yesterday’s peaceful cottage is now a murder scene. The previously unremarkable butter knife on the counter is now an ominous weapon. The bland, unnoticed doorman is now a suspect. “Those who step into this pattern, often through no fault of their own, have no choice but to follow the mystery through to its end. That, or live their lives stuck in its web. It isn’t a matter of deserving or undeserving, good or bad. It is only what the facts tell us.” But in an Interview interview in 1979, Silette amended his words: “Perhaps, though, it isn’t mysteries that create these webs,” he said. “Perhaps the mystery is only what allows us to see them. Maybe that doorman really was capable of great evil all along. Maybe the butter knife has always been a complicated, portentous thing. But it was only their proximity to a mystery that allowed us to see it.”