The City & the City by China Miéville

China Miéville is partial to a fabricated city setting, and he has outdone himself here by constructing two adjoining Eastern European city-states, Beszel and Ul Qoma, and their complex political and linguistic systems. Against this impressively realised backdrop is set a noirish thriller in which Inspector Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad struggles to discover how a student from Ul Qoma came to be murdered and dumped in a skate park at the edge of disintegrating Beszel. The deeper his investigation takes him into the tortuous relationship between the two cities, the greater danger Borlú is in – but as the story hurtles towards its overly complicated climax, the characters become rather lost amid the political invention.