City of Strangers

September 5, 2016
Freelance photographer Grace Scott, the heroine of this uneven psychological thriller from British author Millar (The Hidden Girl), comes home to her Edinburgh apartment from her honeymoon abroad to discover a stranger’s body on her kitchen floor. A cryptic note found among the unopened wedding presents and a stalled police investigation lead Grace to try to identify the dead man. Despite her husband’s demands that she leave the matter to the police, Grace forges ahead in the hope that her investigation will also jump-start her career as a photojournalist. As Grace and her fellow photographer Nicu Dragan follow leads across Europe, veteran reporter Sula McGregor is covering the gruesome deaths in a pit of two people with no apparent connection to each other. Eventually, a link to the three deaths emerges. While Millar expertly builds tension and brings the story to a climatic end, the characters never develop fully. Hopefully, her next outing will be a return to the strong writing readers enjoyed in her earlier books.

A photographer finds a dead man in her kitchen and sets out to identify him.Grace Scott and her new husband, Mac, return to their Edinburgh apartment from their honeymoon in Thailand to find a decomposing dead man in their kitchen. But before Mac sees the body, Grace spends several bizarre minutes creeping around the sprawled dead man, photographing him from different angles. Grace then lies to police officials about the time she spent with the body prior to their arrival and decides that if no one steps forward to claim him, she's going to track down the man's true identity. A freelance feature photographer who aches to get into cutting-edge news reporting, Grace is unaware that another man is both hiding and eavesdropping on her--and on the police--in the space beneath her upstairs apartment. Growing more and more obsessed with the dead man's past, Grace sets out to find his family. He left behind a cryptic note that said, "I am not that man," signed Lucian Grabole, which leads Grace to a homeless shelter and then to the next step in her journey: London. Meanwhile, a reporter named Sula, who works for Scots Today, is investigating the discovery of a body in what appears to be an unrelated case. Millar has written a convoluted story that's bereft of thrills but jammed from cover to cover with annoying and undeveloped characters. Both Grace, who abandons her husband in her quest to become a photojournalist, and bitchy, abrasive Sula prove so unpleasant that readers will find themselves rooting for the bad guys.The story falls victim to Millar's florid, overwrought prose and an unbearably silly subplot. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 15, 2016
Returning from a two-week honeymoon in Thailand, photojournalist Grace Scott finds a man's body in her Edinburgh flat. When the corpse still has not been identified three months later, and she's found a cryptic note with the name Lucian Grabole in it, Graceobsessed with concern for the dead man's loved onestakes off to find answers herself. She's encouraged and aided by her former journalism classmate Ewan Callow, an assistant at the newspaper Scots Today, who thinks she has a story that can be sold. As Grace travels to London and then the Continent, the narrative toggles between her odyssey and that of Ewan's boss, cagey Sula McGregor, who's working on a story about the murders of two men found in a pit cave. With danger increasing around Grace, she also faces increasing anger from new husband, Mac, who's trying to constrain her after their 19 years together. After some relatively slow going, Millar increases suspense to a roaring conclusion that ties the two plot threads together. With its well-drawn characters and brisk prose, this is an eminently satisfying thriller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)