Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

It's an amazing book. I didn't want to like it on so many levels but, and it is a VERY big but, it is, and yes, I'm repeating myself, an amazing book. Well plotted, brilliantly narrated, real without being gruesome, and while the author through the main character is very clear that there are no happy endings, it isn't emotionally devastating either.

This is the book that you'll want to get all your friends to read so you can discuss it over several drinks some night, then hook up just to reacquaint yourself with your own reality.

Simply one of the best books I have listened to in a very long time. I've enjoyed other audible books but not anything like this one. Claire DeWhitt is not sugar coated. She's tough talking, insightful and intellegent. The New Orleans setting is spot on for after "the storm" as are the characters and story line.
It's rare when a book and a narrator are such a perfect match and this one is just that. Carol Monda is Claire DeWhitt in my mind. She was beyond perfect.

The tale is simple enough. A well-known ADA goes missing in New Orleans after Katrina. What happened? Why? (The who is less important.) The answers are straight forward; the reader will pick up most of the solution about half way through the book. It's the character development that kept me listening. The characters, in this case, include the city, the victims, the detective, her mentor, and many others. I liked that the author followed through to some extent on what happened after the case was solved.

The narrator is excellent. She conveys the story (told in the first person) with conviction.

Yes; unique setting - post-Katrina New Orleans and interesting characters.

Good accent work 90% of the time; french accent is abit annoying.

I thought that this was going to be a run of the mill supernatural detective meets supernatural mystery based on the original review. However, this novel plays around with the noir detective genre and sets it in post-Katrina New Orleans. Claire DeWitt is the hard-boiled detective who is savvy about race relations, class consciousness, post traumatic stress disorder, and the way that things really work. She does consult the I Ching and listens to her dreams, but these are almost secondary...she does a lot of old-fashioned detective work and instead of drinking a ton, she does drugs with her suspects.

The actual mystery becomes almost secondary to the narrative, the pacing, and the overall good writing.

The narrator is also very good with a suitably gravelly voice.

I loved this book. Sara Gran created such an interesting character in Claire DeWitt -- smart, flawed, blessed, and cursed. I think I would have enjoyed the book no matter who narrated it, but Carol Monda -- my gosh, she really brought Claire to life with her sultry, cynical, fluid reading.

I really wanted to enjoy this book because it was recommended by others and I liked the title. I found myself yawning through most of it due to the redundancies of storyline and approach: I've read this character and her problems before and the ending was pretty formulaic.

very creative....not just another mystery...........clever and entertaining. Loved it!
the characters were fun...waiting for the next one.

I got this book through some sort of promotion or other. Always a good way to meet a new writer, though it's hit and miss. This book was good enough that I will keep choosing her books and I hope they are as good as this one.

The story moved along well and the character development was excellent. It isn't a supernatural story, the IChing and her dreams are just a portion of what she uses to solve the mystery and are related sort of in passing. It's a good choice for a listen.

My niece and I listened to this book as we drove to New Orleans from Phoenix. It was a perfect entre to a city that is uniquely its own place. The book told the post Katrina story in a way that nothing else I've read or heard has done. The New Orleans of the book overlapped so strongly with the New Orleans we visited that it was hard to tell one from the other. Andre's story would not have been as real or his pain as great had we not driven through the lower 9th Ward. Our hotel, near the Super Dome was a constant reminder of the horrors that took place there. At first I found the narrator, Carol Monda, to be too coarse of voice but once I became accustomed to it, it seemed perfect. Sara Gran created characters so real that I believed I saw those actual people when I walked the streets of New Orleans, listened to the groups of musicians who formed on street corners at night and observed a city unique to the United States. The juxtaposition of light and dark, saints and sinners, good and evil draw people to this place and I better understand why. With a history worthy of study, New Orleans can be many things depending on where you look. Sara Gran has captured a few of them and brought them to life in this gritty story that made my trip to the Big Easy memorable.