The Other Side of the Mirror

–>I received a free copy of this in exchange for an honest review.
A detective investigating several murder cases finds them linked and wades through an incredibly corrupt system to find the truth...

Carl Duggan is your typical hard-boiled detective type .. at first glance. As it goes on you see he has incredible depth to him. The story is full of his wonderful inner dialogue. He's also a very conflicted character, while the rest of the City is corrupt and most of the police are on the take, he refuses to be so as well. But he's still an incredibly violent man, shooting the worst criminals and prefers beating people up to gain information. He does all this while wishing for the City to be better, and at the same time telling us over and over it's a broken place that will never be any better. I enjoyed seeing him be violent one scene, then doing the best for victims he comes across the next, making his own sort of justice.

The characters that aren't completely criminals in the story are all like this really, “good” people who are tainted by the City. His partner Trent, a homophobe that takes bribes... but only from the worst criminals, and he tries to be a good detective otherwise .. Pope, a hitman who prefers to kill only criminals... you get the idea.

The City is quite the character itself. It's always referred to as just “the City”, I kept waiting for a name thinking I missed it. It's comprised of an East and West, separated by a river called the Styx, its name from people dumping corpses there. The East is the poor side, and the West the rich... but both are repeatably declared just as filthy as the other, both full of just different types of criminals. Both the narrative and Carl himself relate just how bad the City is, and I loved the descriptions of the corrupt place, where everyone is “infected” and no one leaves. Great world-building here.

I decided to focus on the characters for this review because telling too much about the murder mysteries will ruin it .. but as it goes on you will see how well set up and thought out it was. All the pieces are placed and interconnected before you realize it, which is a good thing because otherwise, the ending would have made me feel cheated. Even if you see what's coming everything was done well and made sense. I found myself wanting to be mad at it, but couldn't rightfully be because everything was already there and logical.

Great writing that brings the City to life, a main character that's surprisingly deep, and the murder mysteries are all wrapped up intelligently.