The City Under the Skin by Geoff NicholsonFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014

The flap copy of this book calls it a “haunting literary thriller” that’s a “deft portrait of a city in transition” and “a hymn to the joys of urban exploration.” It has moments of being all those things, but I’d say it’s mostly a thriller, which isn’t a genre I really read. Maybe that means I’m not the ideal audience for this book: maybe Nicholson is playing with conventions of that genre here, and maybe the way he plays with them adds to the reading experience. I don’t know: I wasn’t totally won over. The book opens with a murder, with a hit-man named Wrobleski killing a well-dressed older man in a parking garage. In the next chapter, we meet Billy Moore, a criminal trying to leave crime behind him so he can keep custody of his twelve-year-old daughter. In chapter three, a woman is kidnapped, tattooed, and then returned to the spot where she was taken. These threads come together as the book proceeds: Wrobleski and the murders he commits (or doesn’t), Billy’s inability to turn down a job offer from Wrobleski, despite the fact that he’s supposed to be going straight, and a number of women, all kidnapped and tattooed the same way as the first. And then there’s Zak, a map-nerd who works in a store that sells antique maps, and Marilyn, a photographer/squatter/city-explorer who Zak quickly falls for. There’s more violence in this book than in most books I read, but there’s humor, too: an early scene with Billy and his daughter Carla and a social worker is hilarious/excellent. But I wanted this book to be something different than what it was: the city, with a few exceptions, felt frustratingly vague. It’s “a big mess,” “in the process of being simultaneously built and unbuilt, reshaped and made formless,” (37) but I wanted to see concrete examples of that—there are a few, in the form of a crumbling 1960s hotel (where Marilyn squats) and the juxtaposition of an abandoned subway station/construction of a new subway line, but I wanted more.