A clever blend of mystery and fantasy-sort of "something wicked this way comes" meets Dashielle Hammett.
I wish I'd read it before aseeing Inception ( )

A decent freshman effort. It has an interesting premise, and a fun alternate reality in the vein of the Eyre Affair.

That being said though, the writing was at times a bit labored, the characters were rather flat, and their motives were often indecipherable.

It's a book about reality, dreams of reality, dreams of dreams of reality, and so on. The rules in each world seemed inconsistent and contrived, at least on first reading. Unfortunately I'll probably never get around to a second one.

And most damning for me anyway, at least in a mystery novel, was that so many of Unwin's deductions just seemed far fetched and unsubstantiated.

Plus: a Mexican standoff? Really?

( )

I really trudged through this book. I don't even remember putting it on hold at the library, but I must have! (Unless I tragically picked up someone else's hold...it could happen). Anyway, I'm sure the hook for me was mysteries being solved in dream states or something like that. I can say I read it. I am ready to move on! ( )

Fascinating and surreal, this book put me in mind of the movie Dark City which is a mixture of noir and dream time in which things are not what they seem at first glance.

Charles Unwin, a clerk of the detective agency where he works, inexplicably gets promoted to detective when his detective, Severt(sp?) disappears off the grid. Unwin finds himself thrust into a surreal landscape of several crimes which he'd thought solved but due to some of his own conceits (such as his leaving out the more interesting details of Severt's musings over his cases) were actually not solved at all. It's up to Unwin to untangle the dreams of others, his own case files and the strange clues he's given by a variety of interesting people along the way to solve this riddle and get his old job back.

I like the feel of the story. The constant rain, the sense of shades of gray, Unwin's prized bicycle and umbrella, his habits and curiosity are so well described, you feel as if you're within the book itself. The structure of the book is more like a dream itself, with everything out of synch and not following any particular timeline. While this may seem confusing at first, the further into the story, the more sense it makes. It's well worth the time to puzzle your way through with Charles Unwin. ( )

I'm really liking this post modern mystery fiction phenomenon. This book also reminded me strongly of the movie Dark City which also contains a world bounded in one metropolis where the residents may be manipulated in sleep.
I didn't quite love it and didn't see much point in the Overseer/Caligari/Hoffman trifecta. But I did like the ending, Travis T. Sivart and the lowly clerk narrator. ( )