317. & 318. City of Masks & Deceptions
City of Masks by Mary Hoffman - I'd seen this book around, but since it's the first in a series, I'd resisted picking it up till now...
The basic premise of City of Masks is that there exists the ability of certain individuals (the stravagante) to travel between Earth and a parallel world much like it, but different in time. Hours passing in our Earth are equal to days in Bellezza, a city much like Venice and ruled by a masked Duchess.
Our protagonist, Lucien, is a teenage boy living in our London who is undergoing chemotherapy and discovers that he has this ability, leading him to a double life in both worlds. Naturally, there are plots and counterplots galore as the life of the Duchess is threatened and Lucien's new friends hold the key to the city's future prosperity, in more ways than one.
Set partly in Washington and partly in New Mexico, Deceptions begins with the murder of Connor's former lover, an Italian model. When Connor, who used to be a district attorney, starts to probe a little deeper into Elena's life, she discovers that her lover was unfaithful to her and that there's also a possible link between Elena's murder and her father, who works for a shadowy government agency. The first third of the book focusses on that, before Connor goes off to Albuquerque for a writer's conference and finds herself on the run with Laura Nez, her Navajo driver/bodyguard.
Essentially, I found myself tolerating the Washington-based part of the book in the hope the story would improve, particularly since I found Connor decidedly unsympathetic to say the least. Initially, when the action moved to New Mexico, things were quite promising and then Connor started to annoy me again. I couldn't bring myself to continue much past halfway, so I have no idea how Deceptions works out, or indeed any interest in picking up Witchfire to find out what happens next, even with the potential lure of American-writer-writing-about-England when some/all of that book is set in Glastonbury.
