The City Under the Skin
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A cartographic thriller with so many twists and turns it requires its own map
A cartography-obsessed misfit clerk from an antique map store in a district that's not quite trendy yet. A bold young woman chasing the answer to a question she can't quite formulate. A petty criminal hoping the parking lot he's just purchased is the ticket to a new life of respectability with his school-age daughter. A ruthless but vulnerable killer and his disgruntled accomplice. In The City Under the Skin, it's not fate that will bind these characters together but something more concrete and sinister: the appearance of a group of mysterious women, their backs crudely and extensively tattooed with maps.
They have been kidnapped, marked, and released, otherwise unharmed. When one turns up on the doorstep of the map shop and abruptly bares her back, only to be hustled away by a man in a beat-up blue Cadillac, it's the misfit clerk Zak, pushed by his curious new friend Marilyn, who finds himself reluctantly entering a criminal underworld whose existence he'd prefer to ignore.
In this haunting literary thriller, Geoff Nicholson paints a deft portrait of a city in transition. His sharply drawn characters are people desperate to know where they are but scared of being truly seen. A meditation on obsession and revenge, a hymn to the joys of urban exploration, The City Under the Skin is a wholly original novel about the indelible scars we both live with and inflict on others.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This zippy yet predictable literary thriller begins promisingly: a series of women, apparently selected at random, are kidnapped, crudely tattooed with coded maps on their backs, and then released. What do the maps mean? Who is responsible? Billy Moore, a petty thug trying to go straight; Wrobleski, a hit man and map collector; and Zak Webster, an amateur cartographer, try to solve the mystery. Billy is hired by Wrobleski to bring the inked women to his boss (whether they come willingly or not), who then locks them away in his gated compound. Meanwhile, Zak searches for clues as to the meaning of these strange events, aided by Marilyn Driscoll, who comes to his aid when Zak's involvement in the case puts him in danger. Eventually, all parties converge for a rushed, underwhelming climax. Nicholson (Bleeding London) charms the reader with offbeat humor and unexpected narrative tangents, but he doesn't trust his audience enough. Conversations often run on, with characters overexplaining situations, and coincidences Billy's daughter, for example, just happens to suffer from dermatographia, a skin condition resulting in tattoolike marks are unconvincingly used to draw heroes and villains together. An undercooked novel from a prolific writer.
