Book Summary and Reviews of City of Windows by Robert Pobi

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Cloggie Downunder

First-rate crime fiction.
City of Windows is the first book in the Lucas Page series by Canadian author, Robert Pobi. When an FBI agent is shot in his car on a Manhattan street during a snow-storm, Brett Kehoe, Special Agent in Charge of Manhattan, insists on analysis of the scene by Dr Lucas Page. But it’s been ten years since Lucas was part of the Bureau, and he’s wary. The victim’s identity draws him in; he works his magic and pinpoints the location of the shooter. And then Lucas hopes to walk away.

Within hours, another victim, another impossible shot, and Lucas again picks the spot from which the sniper took the shot. But while one of Bureau agents attributes it to random shootings, Lucas can’t dismiss it so easily: he is soon proven right when the victim turns out to be ex-FBI. By the time a third person is shot, under similar impossible circumstances, it is clear that someone is targeting law enforcement officers. But why?

Lucas Page is an interesting protagonist: an astrophysicist and college lecturer who is endowed with acute spatial awareness, making him a whizz at projectile geometry. The Event that ended his career with the Bureau, and his marriage, has left him with several bionic bits and, eventually, a new wife and a tribe of adopted kids. He’s devoid of tact, and shows no compunction about using his grad students to do some Bureau grunt work.

For this case, Kehoe teams him up with Whitaker, a female African-American, intelligent, formidable and with a delightful knack for anticipating questions. Their dialogue is very entertaining, and serves to provide some of Lucas’s backstory (the rest from flashbacks) as well as his strongly-held opinions and his intolerance of stupidity. The heroic Aussie double amputee also charms the reader.

His rant on terrorists is excellent: “Numbers don’t lie. And although everyone is allowed to have a position, not all positions are created equal. There are experts in any given field; one person’s ignorance is not just as valuable as another’s knowledge, and the fact is your average American has to worry about his neighbor more than terrorists by orders of magnitude.” And re gun sales “They weren’t buying protection – they were being sold fear.”

Pobi’s plot is clever, with lots of excellent deductive work, twists, red herrings, plenty of tension and a heart-stopping climax. More of this cast of characters is available to the reader in the second instalment, Under Pressure. First-rate crime fiction.