Toby Ball: 3 books

Big money reshapes an unnamed city as a radical group causes havoc in this thriller that “portrays the realities of graft and moral compromise . . . perfectly” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). It’s the mid-1960s, and the City is a hulking shell of itself. Bohemians, crooks, and snarling...

The “master at creating hallucinatory noir atmosphere” returns to the unnamed city in this follow-up to The Vaults set in an alternate 1950s America (Library Journal). Journalist Frank Frings rouses Lt. Piet Westermann in the middle of the night with an unusual request: move the body of...

At the height of the most corrupt administration in the City’s history, a mysterious duplicate file is discovered deep within the Vaults—a cavernous hall containing all of the municipal criminal justice records of the last seventy years. From here, we follow Arthur Puskis, the Vaults’ hermit-like...