Metropolis

February 15, 2022
The Metropolis is a storage facility in a busy Boston neighborhood, a relic of a more sophisticated time, six stories of brick with crazy round windows and castle-like towers. Some people are calling their units home. One man is an unstable street photographer scraping by on his dishwasher salary. One woman is hiding from ICE while she finishes her doctoral dissertation. Another man operates his law office there, and another woman, avoiding an abusive marriage, has disturbingly re-created her children's bedroom in her unit. Even the units containing actual storage have their own oddities: one is filled with doghouses, another with violins. The building manager profits from his tenants' desperate needs and eccentricities, as they attempt to deal with lives beyond their control. When someone is critically injured in an elevator accident, and the police suspect foul play, it is left to Zach, the building's owner, to find the answer. This spellbinder from the bestselling author of The Art Forger (2012) and The Muralist (2015).leaves the reader at once moved and mystified.

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March 15, 2022
An eclectic cast of characters converges in a self-storage warehouse where crime lurks in every unit. "Metropolis" is the name of a seedy self-storage facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where several renters are hiding more than old furniture and paperwork. Liddy, a wealthy housewife with a violent husband, spends drug-fueled afternoons in a unit stuffed with her children's old toys. Jason, a lawyer fired from his prestigious firm and left by his wife, hangs a shingle outside his unit and practices law from a makeshift office inside. Marta, a brilliant Venezuelan graduate student whose visa has been revoked, lives in her unit while on the run from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The building's owner, Zach, and his employee, Rose, look the other way when renters break the law by occupying units intended for inanimate objects. These arrangements might have continued peacefully were it not for a violent incident, foreshadowed on the first page, in which a man is seriously injured in the building's elevator shaft. Through chapters narrated from the perspectives of several characters, the story of the incident--and its aftermath--unfolds slowly. Unfortunately, the characters are wooden, making it difficult to invest in their demise or salvation. The attempt to create a racially diverse cast flounders due to careless reliance on stereotypes. Black characters, including Jason, consistently curse more than White characters, both in unconvincing dialogue and in interior monologue. Marta, the undocumented immigrant, has little storyline beyond her panicked desire to stay in America. A snappy plot or spirited sentences might partially salvage the stock characters, but this novel has neither. Boston readers might enjoy the close attention to city landmarks, but there's not much else to recommend this thriller.

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March 28, 2022
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.