Customer Reviews
This is no 'Quiet belief in angels' - By: Miss Marple, 13 Sep 2008 
I am sorry to disagree with the other reviewers, but I was reallly disappointed with this book. I absolutely loved Quiet Belief in Angels & could not recommend it nearly enough. I therefore thought that this book would be another triumph but that was not the case. I found this book unbelievable & written in a very irritating style - so much so that I didn't even finish it. While the tone of 'Quiet Belief' was perfectly pitched, I can only think that Ellory watched too much Sopranos before embarking on this & he doesn't quite hit the mark.
Weak, compared to his other titles - By: S. B. Kelly, 12 Sep 2008 I've devoured two other novels by Ellory over the past couple of months, but this was a disappointment. The big problem lies in the characterisation, or lack of it. We have cardboard gangsters, complete with Moll, but the biggest problem lies with the central character, John Harper: surely one of the most uninteresting 'heroes' ever created. He was like a vacuum at the centre of the book & I couldn't have cared less what happened to him.
Move over Puzo - By: Mr. Michael Malone, 28 Jul 2008 
In City of Lies, R J Ellory takes that tried & tested device of placing the ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation...and gives it a Godfather makeover. The ordinary Joe in question is John Harper; one-time novelist, full-time journalist whose byline should read Meaningless in Miami.
Then one day, John receives a calll from his aunt in New York; an aunt who took him in as a child when he was orphaned. The reason? The father he thought he died thirty years ago has just been shot & is lying in a coma in hospital.
As the past & its terrible events crowds in on John the big questions are: who exactly is his father? Why has his aunt lied to him alll these years? John soon meets an old family friend, Walt, his mysterious, blonde colleague & a driven, Marilyn Munroe obsessed detective & as the story gathers momentum & Harper searches for the truth, R J Ellory uses his cast of characters with consummate skill to weave a web of truths, half-truths & lies.
Ellory is a man with an eye for a beautiful sentence & the skill to build a well-crafted plot with cast of characters that will have this book glued to your hands until you reach the hugely satisfying conclusion.
This guy is good - By: myrydyn, 17 Jul 2008 This is the second book of RJE that I have read. This one was not as dark as "A quiet belief in Angels", & so may be easier for others to get into. These books cannot be categorised as thrillers but they have the pace of one. The characters are extremely well thoughtout & the storyline is strong. For an englishman writing about crime in America this guy is brilliant.
There was one fault - the first two or three pages seemed heavy & made me wonder if the book would be good. If you find that the same when you pick it up - persist - it not only gets better it excels.
66 Carmine - By: one-eyed Jack, 06 Jul 2008 Before finishing Ellory's beautiful A QUIET BELIEF IN ANGELS I decided to buy everything else he has written, & CITY OF LIES is the first I found, although it is actuallly his fourth novel. I much prefer the author's original title '66 Carmine' as it evokes thoughts of a more appropriately noir-ish atmosphere than the rather bland title the publishers preferred & more accurately reflects one of the key elements of the story, which is to say this house is where it alll began some three decades earlier & where it ultimately ends. It has to be said that the writing style is so completely different from AQBIA that the reader might wonder if they were both penned by the same man, but there is one thread that both novels have in common: the central character in each case will become a writer, in fact the key man here has already had a book published in years past which is often referred to in dialogue. That man is 36-year-old John Harper, who has lived an unassuming life in Miami unaware that the father he thought had died when he was a boy is in reality one of the most powerful financiers of organised crime in New York. It's only when the elderly boss-of-bosses is shot & criticallly injured that Harper is brought in to act on behalf of the father he never knew so as to bring about the big deal that is designed to hand over power & territory to another leading underworld kingpin. This is a riveting, powerful character-driven tale of life-long deception & power pursuits. Spread over just ten days or so the bulk of the story is built upon the lead up to a climax on a specific date, Christmas Eve, & much of the final 100 pages are dedicated to a minute-by-minute account of several simultaneous bank heists on that day. If this was to be turned into a film, I would suggest that Michael Mann would be the right man to direct it. Despite intense & intimate debate about what went on alll those years ago & what will happen when everything comes to a head in a few days' time, I could not think what the outcome would be as it seemed, in its specific detail, to be utterly unpredictable. The confusion & distraction that Harper & others suffer is felt by the reader too, I for one feeling totallly engrossed in the people, the history & the events, & sensing real tension & danger in the concluding stages. This is a crime thriller with genuine depth & breadth & one that on several occasions manages to move, excite & surprise the reader. The bank heists are pure theatre, vividly cinematic & thoroughly gripping. Once you're in, you won't want to put it down until the very end. Strongly recommended - RJ Ellory has to be one of Britain's best & yet still most promising literary talents.
