Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead

This is a hard boiled detective novel mixed with some mysticism. Like all hard boiled detectives, there is a whole lot of humanity that all lose. People disappoint you, but you get why they disappoint you, so you still care. Since this is a more modern hard boiled detective, she doesn't drink alcohol, but does drugs. There is violence, drugs, and a whole lot of pain in this story.
She is cynical, persistent, and moral, like all hard-boiled detectives. She's also convinced of her own greatness and importance. That doesn't work as well here as it does with the best of the hard boiled detectives. Maybe that's why I like the old time radio programs. They are only about 30 minutes long!
The mysticism helps Clair find her clues, so that is a different spin on the hard boiled detective trope. I don't hate Jacque Sillette, but sometimes it seems forced.
The part that really made me take stars away is the racism that Clair doesn't think she has. I think she puts on black face to disguise herself once. She prays in an Native American language, I think. She didn't use that word, so maybe she really did mean from India. I'm not sure, but either way it felt a little too much like a white savior mixed with a little cultural appropriation.
However I will probably read the next one.

Claire DeWitt has to be one of the oddest detectives ever. She is kind of spooky, she has no fear, she gets inspiration from dreams and I Ching, she drinks too much, and she does drugs. Additionally, she seems to be in a perpetual state of existential crisis, with events of her past dogging her ceaselessly.
Such a person should be a total wreck, no? But au contraire, she is “the best detective in the world”.
Claire DeWitt returns to New Orleans, a city where she has a lot of history, to investigate the disappearance of a DA attorney who went missing during Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans is still a broken city. It and its citizens have not yet recovered from the trauma. Her investigation takes her deep into the NO gang culture. She knows it is dangerous, but she cannot help but go where her detective sense takes her. She has adventures, some of them internal, on the fringes of society as she follows her unconventional path to the truth.
An odd-ball story, but I liked it.
3.5 stars rounded up.