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The Infinite Blacktop

A Novel

LIST PRICE $19.99

About The Book

Named one of the best books of 2018 by NPR

The “delicious and addictive” (Salon) Claire DeWitt series returns with a thrilling, noirish knockout of a novel that follows three separate narratives starring the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest detective.” As Cara Hoffman, author of Running, says, this “is a hard-boiled, existential masterpiece.”

Claire DeWitt, the world’s best private detective, wakes up one dark night in an ambulance in Oakland: someone has just tried to murder her. But she’s not dead. Not yet.

More sure of herself than of the police, Claire follows the clues on a 52-hour odyssey through shimmering Las Vegas and the shabby surrounding desert to find out who wants her dead. But in order to save herself, Claire will have to revisit her own complicated past as she navigates the present: a past of childhood obsessions, rival detectives, lost friends, and mysteries mostly—but not always—solved.

Three intertwining stories illuminate three eras of Claire’s life: her early years as an ambitious girl detective in Brooklyn (before it was gentrified), which ended when her best friend and partner in crime-solving disappeared; a case of an unexplained death in the art world of late-1990s Los Angeles, when, devastated by the demise of her mentor in New Orleans, Claire was forced to start again; and her current quest to save her own life from a determined assassin.

As the connections between the stories come into focus, the truth becomes clear. But Claire, battered and bruised, will never quit her search for the answer to the biggest mystery of all: how can anyone survive in a world so clearly designed to break our hearts?

About The Author

Eliza Gran

Sara Gran is the author of Saturn’s Return to New York, Come Closer, Dope, as well as two previous novels featuring Claire DeWitt. Her work has been published in more than a dozen countries. Born in Brooklyn, Sara lived in New York City until 2004. She now lives in Los Angeles and has a successful career writing for television.

About The Reader

Why We Love It

An utterly original and ingenious novel that hit me like a bolt of lightning…I fell hard for Claire DeWitt, the heavy-drinking, trouble making, self-medicating, self-destructing private investigator. In the end, Claire is looking to solve the ultimate mystery-how are we meant to live on this planet when everything around us is clearly designed to break our hearts? —Peter B., VP, Editor in Chief on The Infinite Blacktop

Product Details

  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio (September 18, 2018)
  • Length: 304 pages
  • Runtime: 9 hours and 16 minutes
  • ISBN13: 9781508268703

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Raves and Reviews

"Claire DeWitt is a private eye like no other, and narrator Madeleine Maby embraces her feisty personality. Three subplots covering three time frames make up DeWitt's latest story. In the present, someone has just tried to kill her and may try again. In flashbacks to her childhood, listeners learn how she came to be a detective. And in the middle, linking the two, DeWitt solves the murder of an artist in 1990s Los Angeles. All the strands fascinate, and DeWitt is a marvelous blend of detectives from classic fiction and from comic books. Maby ensures that this is a great listen as long as disbelief is totally suspended."

– AudioFile Magazine

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