AUTHOR: China Mieville
This is pretty much a standard mystery involving the murder of a young woman who was killed in one city and her body dumped in another city. What makes this a fantasy is that both cities, Beszel and Ul Qoman, occupy the same piece of geography. For the cities to safely co-exist, their citizens must master the art of unseeing the other. While this forms the foundation of the story, it's never fully explained how this can be. No mention of phasing or alternate realities are mentioned, hence the fantasy element rather than this being science fiction, I suppose. To see the unseeable, or to cross any of the boundaries separating the cities is to breach, invoking the justice of the Breach, the mysteries beings who oversee the integrity of the two cities.
As Inspector Borlu of Beszel investigates the murder, he is forced into working with Detective Dhatt of Ul Qoma, an investigation that suggests the victim was killed because she knew too much about the long rumored entities that live between the cities, something scarier than Breach.
This would have made for a decent mystery without the fantasy element, but the setting does factor into the resolution and provides for intriguing character tensions and suspense. Still, I wish the set-up of the cities had been more scientific. Stronger characters would have gone a long way to flesh this out. Only Borlu seemed fully realized and most of the characters speak in similar patterns, in both cities, in choppy, incomplete sentences. This was good enough for met to wish it were better.
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