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A review by shelfofunread
City Without Stars by Tim Baker
3.0
Reading a book that’s outside of your comfort zone can be scary – you don’t get that warm blanket of instant familiarity and have to fight against the bit of your reading brain that says you won’t enjoy it. But getting away from your reading comfort blanket can be extremely rewarding too – the books challenge and engage, providing different input and exposure to new scenarios, new characters and new writing style.
This, in a nutshell, was my experience reading City Without Stars. The novel is a gritty urban thriller set in Ciudad Real, Mexico. Amidst a deadly war between rival cartels, hundreds of sweatshop workers are being murdered. It’s not afraid to show the gritty reality of life and the descriptions of Ciudad Real, from the slick offices of the wealthy to the slums and sweatshops that house so many people, are evocatively described. The characters, similarly, feel real. These are not nice people – there are no heroes in this novel – but they are people, real and flawed and with a range of complex emotions and reasoning behind what they do.
This combines to create a fantastically taut atmosphere, tense and claustrophobic with a growing sense of the net tightening as the story progresses. It’s extremely compelling and definitely has that page-turning quality. Even the violence, which is frequent and bloody, and the language, with an f-bomb on every page, didn’t feel unnecessary – yes, it’s unpalatable but that’s because it’s meant to be. There are no off-page deaths here – if it happens, the reader experiences it because the characters experience it and it feels frighteningly real.
Whilst I wouldn’t say it’s converted me to a reading diet of gritty underworld crime, it was a novel that broadened my horizons – the Latin American setting was a new one to me and I found the challenges of investigating amidst the drugs war and the internal corruption to well-conceived and though-provoking. It’s not a novel for the faint-hearted but fans of hard-boiled detective novels and urban thrillers will definitely find a page-turning, compelling read in City Without Stars.
This is an edited version of a full review which appeared as part of the City Without Stars blog tour on my blog, https://theshelfofunreadbooks.wordpress.com. My thanks go to the publisher for an advance copy in return for an honest and unbiased review.
This, in a nutshell, was my experience reading City Without Stars. The novel is a gritty urban thriller set in Ciudad Real, Mexico. Amidst a deadly war between rival cartels, hundreds of sweatshop workers are being murdered. It’s not afraid to show the gritty reality of life and the descriptions of Ciudad Real, from the slick offices of the wealthy to the slums and sweatshops that house so many people, are evocatively described. The characters, similarly, feel real. These are not nice people – there are no heroes in this novel – but they are people, real and flawed and with a range of complex emotions and reasoning behind what they do.
This combines to create a fantastically taut atmosphere, tense and claustrophobic with a growing sense of the net tightening as the story progresses. It’s extremely compelling and definitely has that page-turning quality. Even the violence, which is frequent and bloody, and the language, with an f-bomb on every page, didn’t feel unnecessary – yes, it’s unpalatable but that’s because it’s meant to be. There are no off-page deaths here – if it happens, the reader experiences it because the characters experience it and it feels frighteningly real.
Whilst I wouldn’t say it’s converted me to a reading diet of gritty underworld crime, it was a novel that broadened my horizons – the Latin American setting was a new one to me and I found the challenges of investigating amidst the drugs war and the internal corruption to well-conceived and though-provoking. It’s not a novel for the faint-hearted but fans of hard-boiled detective novels and urban thrillers will definitely find a page-turning, compelling read in City Without Stars.
This is an edited version of a full review which appeared as part of the City Without Stars blog tour on my blog, https://theshelfofunreadbooks.wordpress.com. My thanks go to the publisher for an advance copy in return for an honest and unbiased review.