“No one’s coming,” I said to her. “No one’s coming and no one’s going to help you because this is what this is. This is what it is and this is exactly what was always meant to be.”

I was so looking forward to a noir detective story.

This one is involving Claire DeWitt who becomes a private eye after a long time wishing for it. She and her best two friends, Tracy and Kelly, grew up trying to solve murders and other crimes in her Brooklyn neighbourhoods and she did well, making it into a full time job as an adult.The only disappearance she could not solve was that of Tracy.

“Your assumptions,” Silette wrote, “are your worst enemies. Throw away your clever thoughts. Let the rest of the world drown in lies. Rest on the life raft of truth.”

Infinite Blacktop is as captivating as it is unusual, an alchemical mixture of not one but three mysteries, scattered across time and America, all centered around the badass and deeply damaged Claire DeWitt, whose unconventional, unceasing, irrational mode of detection is like nothing else in crime fiction.”

Ben Winters, author of Underground Airlines

I don’t think I quite liked this book. The three mysteries were not that great and the quirky humour did nothing for me.

The bookjumps around seemingly without purpose and it’s incredibly hard to follow. Kept hoping it would all come together in the end so I would get the point of the scattered episodes. Many readers seemed to like it. I guess I just didn’t get it.

Imagine taking a knife. Imagine taking a nice big kitchen knife and putting it right here—(indicates central torso). Can you imagine that? Are you all with me? Now imagine taking that razor and you cut. You cut and you cut and you cut—and it hurts like hell, it hurts just like you think it does—and you bleed until you find something inside you—until you find something good enough and pure enough and broken enough that you—that this is the very best part of you, this is the essence of you, this is all of your pain and all of your joy compressed into this little, this bloody little thing, like an organ, like a material manifestation of your soul—you cut and you cut until you find this secret thing, this nameless thing, and at great, you know, great personal fucking expense you cut some more and you tear this fucking thing out of yourself, and you leave yourself bloody and raw, and hopefully everyone else in the room too, hopefully you are all in this together, all of you, you know, traumatized or enlightened or whatever by this.
And that thing we find, that thing we find when we cut, is the best thing we have. It’s all we leave behind when we’re gone. And your client wants to use it to do the single most boring, useless thing on earth: make money.

This was well written, the rest, not so much.

I did like the story within a story and the quotes that probably inspired the author to make such an insipid mystery:

The road to the truth is crooked and disreputable. But the detective’s devotion must be absolutely plumb straight, as sure and fast as an American highway

The client already knows the solution to his mystery,” Jacques Silette wrote. “But he doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t hire a detective to solve his mystery. He hires a detective to prove that his mystery can’t be solved.

Coolio. Onto the next book.