The flap copy of this book calls it a “haunting literary thriller” that’s a “deft portrait of a city in transition” and “a hymn to the joys of urban exploration.” It has moments of being all those things, but I’d say it’s mostly a thriller, which isn’t a genre I really read. Maybe that means I’m not the ideal audience for this book: maybe Nicholson is playing with conventions of that genre here, and maybe the way he plays with them adds to the reading experience. I don’t know: I wasn’t totally won over. The book opens with a murder, with a hit-man named Wrobleski killing a well-dressed older man in a parking garage. In the next chapter, we meet Billy Moore, a criminal trying to leave crime behind him so he can keep custody of his twelve-year-old daughter. In chapter three, a woman is kidnapped, tattooed, and then returned to the spot where she was taken. These threads come together as the book proceeds: Wrobleski and the murders he commits (or doesn’t), Billy’s inability to turn down a job offer from Wrobleski, despite the fact that he’s supposed to be going straight, and a number of women, all kidnapped and tattooed the same way as the first. And then there’s Zak, a map-nerd who works in a store that sells antique maps, and Marilyn, a photographer\/squatter\/city-explorer who Zak quickly falls for. There’s more violence in this book than in most books I read, but there’s humor, too: an early scene with Billy and his daughter Carla and a social worker is hilarious\/excellent. But I wanted this book to be something different than what it was: the city, with a few exceptions, felt frustratingly vague. It’s “a big mess,” “in the process of being simultaneously built and unbuilt, reshaped and made formless,” (37) but I wanted to see concrete examples of that—there are a few, in the form of a crumbling 1960s hotel (where Marilyn squats) and the juxtaposition of an abandoned subway station\/construction of a new subway line, but I wanted more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The flap copy of this book calls it a “haunting literary thriller” that’s a “deft portrait of a city in transition” and “a hymn to the joys of urban exploration.” It has moments of being all those things, but I’d say it’s mostly a thriller, which isn’t a genre I really read. Maybe that means […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}