The latest addition to my website is Geoff Nicholson‘s The City Under the Skin. I notice that this is the sixteenth novel by Nicholson I have read and I can safely say that I have enjoyed them all. This follows the usual Nicholson pattern – a mysterious plot with twists and twists within twists, the rich and powerful behaving badly, the situation saved by the fairly naive and innocent ordinary person (or persons, in this case), the dark side of the city (an unspecified New York-like city in this case) and plenty of black humour, with a dose of violence and cars. It involves maps, particularly a map tattooed on the back of women, without their permission, which may or may not mean something and which our hero and heroine are determined to find the meaning of, despite the hitman, the property developer/map shop owner and the hit man’s assistants. We plunge into the bowels of the city as well as on roof tops and in a former revolving restaurant at the top of a hotel (Wikipedia has a list , of course) before all is more or less explained. It is, as usual with Nicholson, great fun and a good read, though seems to have received little attention in the UK, which is a pity.