Book review: The Map of Moments
The Map of Moments is the second "Hidden Cities" collaboration between Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon, and as you'd expect from a UK/US writing partnership, a novel about London is followed by one about an American city, specifically post-Katrina New Orleans. A former resident returns for the funeral of an ex-girlfriend who died in the hurricane, only to get caught up in the history of a magical cabal who've ruled New Orleans from behind the scenes for centuries. Like Mind the Gap before it, it's entertaining enough if not spectacular, and has a strong sense of place, building a picture of the city both before and after its devastation. I did though find there were a few too many locals looking out into the middle distance with sadness in their eyes - with a disaster as well-known as this one, and in the TV and internet age, I think the reader can be trusted a bit more to understand the scale of the devastation without needing it spoon-fed. Still, a spirit of survival does eventually emerge in the novel, and it's interesting enough to make me likely to read the third installment when that comes out (I think the third city in the sequence is Venice.)