The City and the City is a murder mystery that focuses on the death of a woman who was found essentially in the wrong city, and trying to figure out what happened to her. More than that, though, the story is about two cities that share the same physical space, that crosshatch in places, and that people can move between even though doing so is illegal. To acknowledge the existence of the other city is illegal and you can be taken by the mysterious Breach if you dare to acknowledge that there is something else there.
The focus is really more about the two cities than the murder mystery. It seems very much that the murder is more used as a way to explore the way the fact that there are two of them, and how they try to insist that they are different and how little this whole setup actually works. The story gets lost at times in the exploration of how the two cities insist that they are not sharing a physical space.
The ending was unsatisfying for me, but not entirely unexpected. Throughout the book they talk about how the setup of the universe doesn’t work for anyone but never really address it in a meaningful way, opting instead to maintain the status quo as if it goes without saying that it is the correct thing to do. When in the end that was never addressed, never questioned, never anything, I felt a bit cheated.
Overall, it’s okay. The premise is interesting, but the story isn’t quite sure what it really cares about. It’s not one I’ll be going back to.