Metropolis
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestselling author of The Art Forger delivers a spellbinding and moving novel about what we hang on to, what we might need to let go, and how unexpected events can lead us to deeper truths.
Six people, six secrets, six different backgrounds. They would never have met if not for their connection to the Metropolis Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. When someone falls down an elevator shaft at the facility, each becomes caught up in an intensifying chain of events.
We meet Serge, an unstable but brilliant street photographer who lives in his storage unit, which overflows with thousands of undeveloped pictures; Marta, an undocumented immigrant finishing her dissertation and hiding from ICE; Liddy, an abused wife and mother, who recreates her children’s bedroom in her unit; Jason, a former corporate lawyer now practicing in the facility; Rose, the office manager, who takes illegal kickbacks to let renters live in the building; and Zach, the building’s owner and an ex-drug dealer, who scans Serge’s photos as he searches for clues to the accident.
But was it an accident? A murder attempt? Suicide? As her characters dip in and out of one another’s lives trying to find answers and battling societal forces beyond their control, B. A. Shapiro both questions the myth of the American dream and builds tension to an exhilarating climax. Taut and emotional, Metropolis is impossible to put down and impossible to forget.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The tepid latest art-tangential mystery from Shapiro (The Collector's Apprentice) revolves around the tenants of a Boston-area storage space. Rose, the manager of Metropolis, a castle-like facility near MIT, takes kickbacks from those who illegally live in their units. Then there's a disastrous accident on the facility's elevator. The who and why don't come out until the end. In the aftermath, owner Zach, a rudderless yuppie, goes into foreclosure, and the insurance company auctions off everything that's left. Live-in tenants include Marta, a PhD student from Venezuela who's in the country illegally; Serge, a troubled photographer; and Jason, a lawyer and whistleblower who, having lost his high-powered job, now works out of Metropolis. Liddy, married to a nasty real estate mogul, also pays Rose for the privilege of setting up a shrine to the children her jealous husband sent away to boarding school. Jason agrees to take on Marta's case, and Liddy, too, decamps to Metropolis, after she bonds with Marta and decides to leave her husband. Meanwhile, Zach discovers scads of Serge's photos, which he believes he can profit from, and Rose's family situation becomes desperate. With flat characterization and a predictable plot, Shaprio plods toward a happy ending. This lacks the frisson of the author's earlier books.
Customer Reviews
One glaring error is hard to get past
If a person takes an elevator to floor #4, it’s the elevator, and a person later falls through the elevator doors they would land on the floor of the elevator. They would not fall down the shaft and land on top of the car 2 floors below if there was no one else in the building. I couldn’t get past this mistake, it ruined the last ⅓ of the book for me. A mistake like that should have been caught.