CLAIRE DeWITT and the city of the dead COMING FROM HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT IN SPRING 2011.(n.b.: title still subject to change!)   Finally, Sara Gran's eagerly-awaited new series (already optioned for TV) featuring the dark, weird, brilliant, quasi-psychic investigator Claire DeWitt. While the tattooed, pot-smoking Claire has excellent skills of deduction and analysis, she also uses dreams, memory, precognition, and mind-expanding herbs to help her solve mysteries. But most of all she

relies on guidance from the mysterious French detective Jacques Silette and his enigmatic book, Detection. Shot through with memories of Claire's years as a girl detective in 1980s Brooklyn, these are no ordinary mysteries, but rather investigations into the very nature of mysteries themselves. What is a crime? What is a mystery? Why do some of us solve them while others pass them by? And most of all, how do we know the truth, and recognize it when we see it?The first book (CITY OF THE DEAD) takes place in post-Katrina New Orleans, where both Claire DeWitt and her creator have deep history. Assistant district attorney Vic Willing went missing during the storm. But the clues tell Claire he didn't drown--he was murdered. Hired by Willing's nephew, Claire investigates in the city she used to love, where her mentor, Constance Darling, was murdered years before. And in the wreckage, Claire finds the depths to which people in crisis can sink--and the heights to which they can rise.UK RELEASE from Faber & Faber 2011.TELEVISION SERIES planned by Fremantle (the company that brought you AMERICAN IDOL) and the Todd Sisters (responsible for MEMENTO BOILER ROOM, and all three AUSTIN POWERS films).