City of Strangers

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. (Nov.)