City of Windows Robert Pobi

Where do I start with a book as good as this?

The storyline is brilliant.

The main character is unique in modern writing.

The settings are, well its New York City so it’s anything-goes and its believable.

Let’s start with the story. A sniper is making impossible shots in New York. Firing from distance, from height, through almost impossible gaps in the tower blocks. The first person they hit is a federal agent, so is the second. Is that a coincidence? No of course not. Are these agents being selected at random or is there a connection.

Then there’s the main character, Lucas Page. Lucas is a University Professor, or he is now, he used to be something very different, but that cost him an arm and a leg, literally, and an eye. Fitted with prosthetics and a false eye he is happily(ish) teaching at a University until the sniper makes his first hit. Then his ex-colleagues need his speciality, because Professor Page is a maths genius. He sees things in numerical blocks and can calculate distances and angles in an instant. In fact he can reverse engineer the factors needed to identify the most likely location of the snipers nest before the forensic scientists can get their equipment out of their cars.

Lucas is happy in his new world of teaching, its safe and he goes home at night. His wife is happy as well, because he comes home at night and acts as a father to their ever increasing brood of fostered children.

So when Luke is told he has to go back neither he nor his wife are happy, but it’s not long before he’s bitten by the bug and is immersed in the investigation.

The FBI are convinced they know the identity of the killer and all they have to do is find them. Lucas is less convinced.

Battling against some of the brass within the FBI who are sceptical in his abilities, and are target focused on the man they think is killing their agents, Lucas finds an ally in Special Agent Whitaker, the tall woman who has been assigned to be his chaperone during the investigation.

This is a clever story. Snipers in the big cities of the world is already one of the threats that have law enforcers worried. To us one in a story like this shows how random the attacks can be, the effect it has on the community, and just how difficult it would be to catch a well prepared marksman.

Robert Pobi has just gone to the top of my list of back catalogues to read, and any future books will be read as soon as I can get my hands on them.

Pages: 400
Publishers: Mulholland Books

I do like a police procedural and thought this story was very good. It was tightly plotted and moved along at a great pace. I did find the characters a little one-sided, especially the minor one - I felt that the family were dispatched out of the story line quite hastily, but also that they weren't adding much to the storyline int he first place. Another minor niggle was the overused plot device of the killer coming after the main character. I'm sure this is a very rare occurrence in real life but seems to happen in every book like this that I read. One final niggle - the pet dog attacks a human but with no consequences - it's the bad guys so it's fine. Not acceptable. That dog should have been put down! It wouldn't be safe around children after that. Still, it's a good book and I do recommend it.

Brilliant!
Brilliant!
Brilliant!

What can I say? I don't want to compare Lucas Page to any other of the great characters like Lincoln Rhyme. Lucas Page is someone special and I'm happy he is nót as any of the other great characters. He is unique. I really loved his sense of humor; I think his love for his wife and children is a great thing and he may be a little grumpy sometimes, it makes him all the more likable.
Solving the shooting of his former partner and subsequently other people, Lucas is forced to go to the limits of his extraordinary mind.
Yes, it is possible to write a fast pacing story, with lots of dead people and twists and turns in the plot, and still use a beautiful flowing style, with sharp observations ánd humor.
This was my first Pobi title but I will certainly try and read more of him.

Thank you Netgalley and Hodder for this book.

A gripping thriller and a disquieting look at a nation deeply divided in its beliefs and desires. From the first paragraph you know you are in the hands of a great storyteller who can swiftly flesh out the back story and personality of a character so you feel you know them, even if they only appear for a couple of pages. A different approach is applied to the main characters with their backstories and motivations being expertly teased out through the book. It's not just characters that are well drawn, the geographic locations and action are all vividly described and you can practically feel the deep cold of winter. Thanks to Netgalley and Hodder and Stoughton for providing me with this free ARC and a lot of pleasure.

Thanks to NetGalley and publishers Hodder & Stoughton, Mulholland Books, for the ARC.
It's the middle of New York, days before Christmas, blizzard weather conditions and the city is barely functioning in the freezing temperature - so just how could a sniper have taken that impossible shot? Where in this City of Windows could that shot have been taken from? An FBI agent, slowing his car to allow a stricken pedestrian to cross the hazardous road, would have asked those questions - if the sniper hadn't just blown his head apart with an armour-piercing round.
Lucas Page teaches PHD students at Columbia University, lecturing in astrophysics, and has a gift from childhood which allows him to spatially formulate geometric lines and calculations within his brain to solve complex problems within seconds. He is ex-FBI. He is unsociable, moody, and doesn't suffer fools gladly. He and his second wife Erin, a paediatric doctor, live in a large property and have built a family around them by adopting children who need a stable family life.
Lucas had sworn he would never go back to the FBI - until Brett Kehoe, Agent In Charge of Manhattan, arrives on his doorstep to tell him the dead agent was his old partner and they needed his help.
Further sniper-inflicted deaths occur and Lucas, with his assigned partner and driver, Agent Whittaker, are drawn into the investigations, notwithstanding the Administration's assertions that a certain wealthy French radicalised Muslim is to blame..
Lucas sees things differently to others, including the FBI - instead of looking for patterns that exist - he insists, with the help of his brightest students and an array of heavy-duty university computing power, that they look for 'what isn't there'.
Gradually the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, but it is not until really near the end you get the full picture.
This story contains strongly-worded comment on the USA's Right To Bear Arms lobby; racism, survivalists and gun dealing abound.
I do so hope we hear more from Lucas Page - thoroughly enjoyed this unique character and his abilities.
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This is an absolutely cracking read! A fast-paced crime thriller, well written with gritty and sometimes amusing dialogue highlighting the developing relationships between main characters..

An absolutely stunning thriller that's so fast paced it will leave you breathless. Although laced with the darkest of dark humour, it also raises serious questions about liberty, justice and the USA Constitution's 2nd Amendment - the right to bear arms.
Seemingly out of nowhere a sniper has begun a killing spree - a sniper who is invisible and leaves no tracks. The powers that-think-they-know-it-all believe it's the work of a French millionaire playboy turned radicalised Muslim. The shooting takes place in New York during a winter which is the coldest in living memory. with city is paralysed by blizzards and huge snow drifts.
Lucas Page is an ex FBI agent who lost a hand, eye and leg in an incident he only refers to as "The Event". Now a university professor, he has no intention of ever working for the Bureau again. But the first sniper victim is his former partner, his head blown away by a gunman who killed with a single impossible shot.
Reluctantly agreeing to help out, Page is partnered with Whitaker, a female FBI agent. The two seem a perfect match - no nonsense types who do not suffer fools gladly. Page has a neat line in sarcasm while Whitaker seems to have the uncanny knack of knowing what a person is thinking and answering the question in their head before they ask it. Page has specialist skills like no other. He sees pictures in his head which illuminate a crime scene, showing him lines of trajectory by which he can accurately pinpoint the sniper's location when the shot was fired.
As thousands of FBI agents scour the country and the Internet to find a Muslim terrorist, Page and Whitaker go their own way. The the sniper kills again - and again. The only similarity is the victims were all law enforcement officers of one type or another. But what, if anything, links them together?
We learn that after a long and painful recovery from "The Event", Page remarried and he and his wife Erin are parents to a handful of damaged young children who are slowly learning to live a normal life. He never carries a gun, preferring to use his brain and his own brand of logic. Throughout the book there are many not-so-sly digs at the current US Government and many of its agencies, survivalists, racists and gun nuts. At one point he delivers a rant which neatly destroys the myth that Americans are most at risk from foreign terrorists. Members of the NRA will probably hate this book.
But, overall, this is a story of the relentless hunt for an unstoppable killer with secrets buried in the past - secrets which have been officially covered up for decades. There are a dozen twists and turns which throw the investigation off track, but Page and Whitaker keep moving with the former roping in 3 of his own students to ferret out information from massive banks of computer data. This is a highly original thriller which races along to a shattering climax. It's a truly compelling story which will leave its mark on readers whatever their attitude to guns and gun control. If there's any justice, this will be on of the big sellers of 2019. Highly recommended.

My thanks to the publishers Hodder & Stoughton Mulholland Booksand Netgalley for a copy of this book in return for an unbiased review.

This book introduces us to Astrophysicist Dr Lucas Page, definitely a character I would like to read more about, and hope to in the future.

The book opens innocently enough with someone wondering if they would make it across the road in the middle of a blizzard, and probably would have done if the person driving the car who had slowed down for her, hadn't been shot....... This was just the start.

The story was an absolute page turner, I really enjoyed the book, great characters, even a dog, what more could you need!

Lucas used to work for the FBI, but is now a Physics professor, he sees things different to other people, he sees things as geometry, and numbers. He is partnered with Agent Whittaker and together they are hunting a killer.

A couple of small errors, the French are known as 'Frenchies' rather than 'Frenchers', one spelling mistake 'stich', should be 'stitch' and the formatting was pretty awful with random numbers in the middle of sentences, luckily the book was so enthralling I tried not to let it put me off.

Highly recommend this book, one of the best I have read for a long while. Thank you to NetGalley and Hodder and Stoughton for letting me read the book in return for an honest review.

This is brilliant. Apart from being well written,the choice of Lucas Page as the lead character works extraordinarily well. The use of his family and personal circumstances as a background is done sympathetically. As well as a racing story with many changes of direction, there is humour and very astute comment on American gun owning and perceptive comment on racism there. Despite how that sounds,it is a balanced commentary on modern America. This is one of the best books I have read recently.