White City by Seb Doubinsky

​    I’ve come to rely on Doubinsky’s books as guaranteed good reads. And every reader needs those, something reliable in a generally unreliable world. I love knowing what to expect and still being pleasantly surprised each time with something new.
    Doubinsky’s books take place in a ingeniously imagined world of city states, each seemingly modeled on a well known city with New added on, but each is actually so much more than that, with complex social structures and politics specific to each one.
    These worlds are so awesomely imagined, so intricately crafted, so well built that they leaves realism completing with surrealism as you read them. They are almost but not quite recognizable, like a digitally aged face of your future self.
     This novel takes place in a Nordic Alliance’s Viborg City. It’s a funhouse mirror of a Scandinavian country…and also not, at the same time. Mainly it is known to be safe, if unexciting. Very strictly striated social system of Viborg City has three levels with eponymous White City being at the top of it. The safest, the whitest, the most prosperously sedated place to be. Until a murder of a cosmetics company’s scion throws the proverbial wrench in the works.
     The narrative is a three way split (with cleverly  inserted asides) between a genre author researching his latest book on Nazis and the occult, an ambitious reporter desperate to make her name with this case and a career detective investigating it. They start off as individual separate threads, but eventually are seamlessly woven into one cohesive narrative.
     So if the first rate world building and terrific writing aren’t enough for you, you do also get a murder mystery.  
    I loved this book and loved how cleverly the Nazi and occult themes (always fascinating, mainly because so much of it is preposterously real and historically factual) are utilized in it. Bet the book within the book here would have been fun too.
     At any rate, this city state universe visit was briefer than most, but just as excellent.  Love the writing, the precision and succinctness of it, the slightly surreal realism, the character development. It’s a strikingly complete adventure for such a slim volume. And well worth a read. Recommended.