A review by fictioncourt
City of Strangers by Louise Millar

5.0

5 stars! 

Originally rated with 4 stars but this book is still on my mind, a month later, SO FREAKING GOOD!

OMG this book! Not my usual genre but I enjoyed this so much - more than I thought I would actually. The start was a little rough, after a captivating prologue it sort of slowed down a bit but by Chapter 10 I was so into the story I couldn't sleep until I finished it!

Grace returns home with he new husband to find a dead man inside her apartment, next to her unwrapped wedding gifts, months after her own father died in an apartment all alone. She is a photojournalist that does freelance work for magazines and she's not where she hoped to be in life. Naturally she is drawn to the dead man's case, even more so when the police are unable to identify him and no one comes forward to ID the body either. When she finds a note one day that says “I am not... that man... Lucian Grabole.” she is intrigued even further and decides to hunt down everyone that might have a clue who Lucian is and how did he end up dead in her apartment.

One clue takes hers to another, and another and another, and Grace finds herself traveling around Europe, asking strangers and trying to piece together this man's life. While this story unfolds, back home in Scotland, the police find two other bodies that are somehow linked to the dead man in Grace's apartment.

I won't spoil anything but OMG this story brought tears to my eyes with how amazing it was - and some sad parts at the end. There are so many characters and so many sub-plots happening at the same time, once you get a feeling of who is who and what they part in this story is, it blows your mind! Grace's husband, her liaison in Amsterdam, the people she meets during her journey, everyone that may have known Lucian and Lucian's past itself - I got chills and I could not stop reading. This story is alive and kicking. The characters are complex, well written, entertaining - especially Grace's former journalist co worker Ewan, he is by far the funniest of them all!

I can't recommend this book enough, YOU NEED THIS BOOK! Thriller fans or not, this book got me to love the genre again and it set a high standard, it's a pretty heavy book but you will not be able to put it down. The amount of detail put into this, to connect every dot and bring this world to life, the amazing characters I found myself saying, that's a classic thing to say/do for some of these characters from the first few chapters, I just connected with all of them!

Full of twists and it travels around the world beautifully, unraveling a story from town to town, person to person; Louise Millar crafted a psychological thriller with an unforgettable, chilling tone that intensifies until all the pieces come together in a shocking reveal! Not to be missed!