A review by books_are_nice_and_enjoyable
A City Of Strangers by Robert Barnard

0.0

"People go funny in the head when talking about politics. The evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious as to be worth belaboring: In the ancestral environment, politics was a matter of life and death. And sex, and wealth, and allies, and reputation... When, today, you get into an argument about whether "we" ought to raise the minimum wage, you're executing adaptations for an ancestral environment where being on the wrong side of the argument could get you killed... Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back - providing aid and comfort to the enemy." (E. Yudkowsky)

I added the quote because this is not a mystery novel, it's a long-winded political pamphlet in (poor) disguise, full of the usual sort of lies such pamphlets tend to be full of.

If the author had not already been dead then this would certainly have been the last book by Barnard I ever read (...and if it turns out not to be a one-off, the next one probably will be). I wouldn't want to support in any way a person with that kind of relationship with the truth.