Customer Reviews

City of Tiny Lights

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an incredible book - suspenseful, smart, funny, and loaded with vivid, memorable characters. The best of the batch is the narrator, Tommy Akhtar, a hard-bitten but sentimental, self-loathing but self-congratulatory, alcoholic, chain-smoking ex-mujahedeen London private detective of Ugandan-Indian descent.

As a detective novel, CITY OF TINY LIGHTS totally satisfies. But it isn't just a detective novel. Long after after the ingenuity of the plot has faded from memory, I'll remember Tommy's fumblingly earnest attempts to connect with the people in his life. Even more, I'll remember his voice: equal parts gumshoe, smartass, working-class London tough guy, immigrant, eldest son, and disillusioned ideologue. This character and this book have a wonderful, vibrant humanity.

Neate's lastest novel is an engaging take on the hard-boiled detective genre, albeit one that perhaps somewhat overextends itself just a bit to much to be considered a total knockout of a book. Set in contemporary London (with a minor excursion to the Lymington seaside), the book revolves around Tommy Akhtar. Now in his mid to late 30s, Tommy was born in Uganda to Indian parents who immigrated to England when Idi Amin came to power. But don't let his colorful background fool you (in his youth he fell in with some people at the local mosque and ended up killing Soviets in Afghanistan), he's a classic Chandleresque private eye. Alcoholic? Check. Chain-smoker? Check. Smart aleck? Check. Cynic? Check. Good-hearted? Check. Got a "friend" on the police force? Check. Poor family life? Check. Pursues interesting case even though he's finished what he was paid to do? Check.

It all kicks off when a hooker hires Tommy to track down her missing flatmate/partner, who apparently owes her money. By the time the book is over, this simple case will have spiraled out of control into a very complex situation involving the murder of a Minister of Parliament, a mysterious Russian, an alleged terrorist group, and a cadre of MI5 and CIA agents. Interwoven with this is background on Tommy's life and his relationship with his dodgy brother and whacked out artist father. When the story follows Tommy down the mean streets, doing his work, tracking down the missing girl, sneaking into hotel rooms, and bantering with the supporting characters, the book works very very well. Neate brilliantly catches the patter and rhythm of dialogue, from Tommy's father's stern scolding to the local Pakistani teenage rude boy's patois. Where the book is somewhat less successful is the convoluted plotting, especially once the intelligence agencies are brought into the thick of things and it all gets rather conspiracy-theoryish.

There's a lot to like in the book as Neate takes the reader along for a very colorful and often funny ride. One aspect that's very welcome is that Tommy is a private eye who takes a lickin' and comes away quite wobbly. It's a rare case of the detective getting roughed up and there being real consequences. Some American readers may have trouble deciphering some of the book's pervasive Brit-slang and there's are running references to cricket tactics, lore, and legends which will elude those not familiar with the sport. These minor quibbles aside, it's a pretty entertaining read that's unlike almost anything else out there in the crime genre. I'll definitely be going back to check out Neate's previous books.

Note: The cover of the U.S. paperback edition has an awesome playful cover illustration of London by design outfit "Eboy", whose work (including similar pixel panoramas of Berlin and Venice) is easily found online.

Neate's exploration into the Pakistani/Indian subculture of London via Tommy Akhtar's private detective agency is at once entertaining and fascinating. This first person POV ("I did this, I did that.") can distract some people, though I don't mind it.

Tommy Akhtar, the hard-boiled PI, was a muhjahdin in Afghanistan fighting against the Soviets. He came home to London with a drinking problem and a conscience problem. In this novel, a prostitute (her URL is exoticmelody.com) contracts him to find her flatmate, sexyrussion.com, who has disappeared. From there, Tommy gets involved with the Russian mob, some MPs, and Islamist extremists.

The novel is beautifully written. The characters are all round and wonderfully drawn. Tommy himself is a model for a character. He's deep and round, and I think he's wonderful.

The main stopping point for me in this novel was the Briticisms. While that's certainly not a problem in Britain, and I don't think you can change them without substantially changing the flavour of the book (which would be a shame), it can make the reading tough for an American. Tommy's father quotes pithy cricket aphorisms. I read a couple to my husband, who was first batsman for his university, and he didn't get a few of them. Another friend of mine (who emigrated from the Indian subculture of London when he was 16) read the book, and he found some of the phrasing hard to follow. That, and for some reason, in this hard-boiled detective novel, the "eff word" is dashed out, like "f---ing". That drove me insane.

This book gets five stars for the beautiful characters, wonderful background and setting, and intricate plot. Don't let the bleedin' Briticisms stop you from enjoying this great book.

TK Kenyon
Author of Rabid: A Novel and Callous: A Novel

Though on the surface a murder mystery, the murder part takes a back seat to Neate's characters reacting to the crime. The Product Description and Editorial Reviews above have already told you what you need to know about the story.

With plenty of London street talk; friendships of mutual convenience; dys- and semi-functional families; and denizens of edges of society, we follow our hero (Tommy) as he sticks his nose into places he shouldn't. But, if he hadn't, we wouldn't have had a book to read.

Tommy's attempts to do what is right, if only he'd had some sort of clue as to what 'right' was, land him into mess after mess. From tragedy to downright silly, this was enjoyable.

There were way too many cricket references for any general reading audience. This is another instance of the 'if some is good, more must be better' assumption - and the assumption is false. That, along with the constant repetition of Tommy's smokes and booze, kept this from being a five star read for me.

It is different. Parts are very funny. The characters have some depth. This was well worth my time.

Tommy Akhtar is a Ugandan-Indian immigrant Englishman (a `Paki' as he calls himself), formerly a fighter with the Afghan mujahideen, now a cynical (but occasionally idealistic) private eye living in the orbit of his father and brother in Chiswick, London. He's hard-as-nails, hard drinking, a smoker; he rarely eats any actual food in the book.

He could be a hard-as-nails, hard drinking American private eye except that he's Muslim and he's a major cricket fan. He's also heavily into London street slang.

The plot of the book is almost buried in his life story, which pops up at all kinds of inconvenient moments, in the cricket metaphors (totally incomprehensible to an American) and in the street slang (also incomprehensible to an American, although I got online and looked up some of the terms in an English slang diary).

In spite of the obvious difficulties with the book, I persisted to the end, hoping for a rousing finale that would redeem my struggle with the mysterious cricket dialogue, but I was disappointed. The plot fell flat at the end, and was implausible to boot.

The best feature of the book, for me at least, was the immersion in English immigrant life, which was previously completely unknown territory to me. The stratifications of English culture, informed as it is by immigrants from all over the world - the Caribbean, Africa, India, Russia, Ireland - are fascinating; if the characters were not so cynical and the slang were not so pronounced, I could almost recommend it. As it is, however, it's more trouble than it's worth for American audiences.

I agree with the other reviewers. This is a great detective story -- with plenty of noir and intriguing characters.

I was not sure of what I was getting when I first picked up this book in the Portland, Oregon airport. (The Powell's City of Books shop at the airport is the best airport book store in the country...) The cover by Ben Gibson was certainly arresting, and the description of intriguingly weird: mujahideen, political mystery, East London...

It did take me a bit to get into the swing of the language, but the characters and their narratives, especially the protagonist rang true. While at the end of the book I STILL did not get all of the London slang, I had the most peculiar sensation of not actually reading the book but of becoming an inhabitant the story. It was a wonderfully mesmerizing read.

The story, like all great hard-boiled mysteries, revolves around a relatively simple storyline of greed, passion and our baser emotions. Tommy Akhtar, an Indian-Ugandan private investigator, is hired by a hooker to find her missing friend. Soon Tommy is mixed up with big-time politics, drug dealers and the underbelly of London.

This book is a good mystery, a good perspective on the dark side of London, and a challenge to our own comfortable definitions of multi-cultural-ism. Count me as a fan of Patrick Neate.

picked it up at the library due to the cool cover and couldn't put it down. the london asian-english community is a fascinating subculture, and the detective/suspense pacing and serious "war on terror" plot make for an enriching, exciting read.

I loved the cynical one-liners that came from the main character periodically. There was some slang and some cricket analogies, but they were relatively easy to figure out from context.

Tommy Akhtar is London's only Indian-Ugandan consulting detective, a

chain smoking, hard drinking throwback to the likes of Philip Marlowe

and John Rebus. So when Exoticmelody, a lady of negotiable affection,

is looking for a missing colleague, Tommy is on the case. But what

seems like a simple missing person case turns deadly when a British MP

turns up murdered and Tommy is drawn into a spiraling cycle of lies,

violence and terrorism. What sets this novel apart from other neo-noir

thrillers is the cast of vividly drawn characters, which range from

Tommy's alcoholic artist/philosopher father Farzad to the immigrant

cabdrivers Big John and Swiss Chris. The polyglot nature of immigrant

communities in London is a big theme here, and it's a fascinating

place to set a mystery. Neate makes the most of it by crafting a very

interesting story which deftly updates the noir sub genre to the

present. Let's hope there are more Tommy Akhtar mysteries to come.