Book Discovery

Went to the public library yesterday and was over-joyed to discover a new book by Sara Gran. She's a youngish writer whose heroines are often damaged (and sometimes they are heroines on heroin) and her endings can be shattering--I think I've written here about Dope and Come Closer. One of those--I forget which one--ended with the first person narrator dying, which I thought was a cheat. But she writes interesting plots with main characters who are damaged but not hopeless and never cloying and always active in trying to get what they want. This latest is the second in a series about a female detective named Claire; it's called  Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway.  I had a bad moment last night when I was reading it and wondered if maybe I had just erased the memory of having read it before from my mind. Like, I knew that I'd read one of her Claire books, and had this fear that I'd already read this one but that my memory is so bad, I didn't recognize any of it. To be fair, she did tread back over familiar territory by recounting how she came to be a detective and so there was some repetition of information.  But it wasn't until I read the back of the book and someone wrote how this was the sequel that I relaxed. I mean, the story line didn't seem familiar, but it has happened to me before that I've gotten twenty pages into a book and thought, Wait...Actually, that mostly happens with books by another similar writer, Kate Atkinson and also, it has happened with Sarah Waters. I think that's because I like those writers so much that when I see a book by them, I'm so excited to get to it that I block out the fact that I've been through it before.