cover image The City of Mirrors

The City of Mirrors

Justin Cronin. Ballantine, $28 (624p) ISBN 978-0-345-50500-2

This conclusion to bestseller Cronin’s apocalyptic thriller trilogy ends with all of the heartbreak, joy, and unexpected twists of fate that events in The Passage and The Twelve foreordained. It’s nearly a century after the release of the Easter Virus that decimated humanity and several years since the last of the infected people known as virals were seen. The citizens of Kerrville, Tex., one of the last human enclaves, are just beginning to feel confident enough to settle outside the borders of their protected community. But when pets, and then people, begin disappearing mysteriously, it becomes horrifyingly evident that virals are on the rampage again—and that this time there may be no stopping them. As in the two previous novels, Cronin skillfully manages a large cast of characters, all of whom he has endowed with fully developed personalities that engage the reader emotionally. Although its plot is understandably heavily dependent on events in the first two books, this novel is a superb capstone to a modern horror thriller epic. 15-city author tour. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group. (May)