Claire Dewitt And The Bohemian Highway: A Mystery (Claire DeWitt Novels Book 2)

by Sara Gran

The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl but truly he is investigating something else all together, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Much of your life will be spent in the dark woods, no path visible, with fear and loneliness your only companions.

And when you are sure that you have been forgotten, and that every step has been wrong, and that the woods are swallowing you whole, remember this: I too was once in those woods, and I have emerged to give you, if not a map or a path, hopefully at least a few clues. Remember that I, if no one else, know you are there, and will never give up hope for you, not in this lifetime or the next.

“Karma,” he said once, “is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she chooses.”

He’d just come back from six months in Haiti, studying with bokos and their drummers. I didn’t know much about music, not the technical parts, but we both understood what it was like to devote yourself to one thing above all else. Something you gave your life to, and never knew if you were right to do it or not.

With each day that passed something ugly was growing in me. I watched it grow. I fed it cocaine. I loved it and held on to it, kept it alive. Something had died, but maybe what had replaced it would be better. Maybe this was how people lived, normal people who weren’t me.

“People think love is, you know, this spiritual thing,” the lama said. “This feeling. But that’s not my thing. In my book, love is a physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they’re in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone even when they don’t call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is, you know, earth and shit and blood and hair.”

Maybe out of everything I thought I knew, there was nothing I was more wrong about than my own life story.