Liar City should have had the perfect ingredients to make this an excellent book for me. It’s a thriller with a queer male lead, with romantic tension that doesn’t dominate the story. Unfortunately, I found this book to be rather underwhelming. I don’t regret reading it, and think it will be a great fit for some, but it isn’t going to stick with me for any appreciable length of time.
Read if Looking For: brooding men with southern accents, unethical corporate machinations, running jokes about texting while driving, extremely slow burn romance series
Avoid if Looking For: adrenaline inducing reads, romances resolved in a single book, deeply realized characters
Elevator Pitch:
Reece is an Empath, one of only two in Seattle. He can sense the emotions of others, though he wears special gloves to avoid physical contact and protect both himself and others. Recently, he started developing the ability to read emotions from a distance, and to tell truth from lies. Plant that with a backdrop of a law pushing for increasing regulation of Empath’s lives and job opportunities, throw in the murder of the sponsoring senator, and Reece’s part time job as a police consultant got a lot more interesting. Only this case is joined by the mysterious Dead Man, an urban legend said to hunt rogue empaths with almost unlimited government clearance. The two spend a rather eventful day together to try and stop a series of events that could lead to the change of Empath’s everyday lives forever.
What Worked For Me:
The biggest strength of this book was its take on Empathy. I’ve read a few other books where mind/emotion reading was a significant plot line (most notably The Storm Beneath the World, which was a phenomenal dark fantasy of insect-people), but this felt like a fresh take.
Empaths are, universally, aggressive pacifists. Reece grows sick at the very thought of physical aggression, can’t watch football for fear of witnessing payers getting hurt, and is incapable of violence even threat of death. He’s also on a crusade about safe driving to everyone he meets; his voicemail will tell you on no uncertain terms that texting while driving is dangerous. The more dystopian ‘we must regulate empaths for the pubic good’ and anti-empath sentiment was a bit more run of the mill, but acceptable enough. It made for a nice setup to events of the story, and provided very concrete and understandable ways for the story to be manipulated in ways that wouldn’t be realistic in a word without Empaths having those hard-coded limits.
What Didn’t Work For Me
Unfortunately, beyond that snippet of world building, I thought a lot of this book was fine. Not bad, but not great either. Reece has few character traits beyond his pacifism, a sassy attitude, and deep care for his sister (a police detective who gets involved with the case). The Dead Man has unlimited government clearance and near omnipotence if it suits the mood of the scene, and mostly refuses to give straight answers to any questions. They’re cardboard cutouts, but enjoyable enough to follow.
The larger problems lay in the thriller plotting. A good thriller places a clock on the lead characters, increasing tension and limiting more and more options as they story progresses. In this, I never felt like Reece was in trouble until the climax and moments leading up to it, and the ominous cutaways to various characters doing criminal activities were more interesting than suspenseful. Nor does this book work particularly well as a murder mystery. While there is a murder being investigated, clues and suspects aren’t a significant part of the book.
Instead the characters go paces and do things. While this is true of more or less any book, Liar City felt like a book where characters went paces and did things. The story felt more like a vehicle to explore a world with Empaths (what is the evil corporation who is ‘protecting’ America from empaths for money like? What about a bar with fake empaths where people can go to feel heard?) but these moments never felt like they were adding tension, characterization, or theme to the mix. I’m not even totally sure what I’d rework to something more interesting.
All this said, I didn’t stop reading it, so it isn’t a complete wash.
In Conclusion: An unsuspenseful thriller that’s enjoyable enough, but lacked the tension the story desperately needed.
- Characters: 2
- Worldbuilding: 4
- Craft: 3
- Enjoyment: 2
Marked for Plot 