City of Mirrors (COM) is the final part of a trilogy that began with The Passage and continued in The Twelve. A bit of time has passed since I finished the Twelve, and if I'd had time, I probably would have liked to have gone back and re-read both books before diving into COM. The start of the book does a pretty good job recapping what has occurred in the prior volumes (through more excerpts from "The Book of Twelve", but you miss a bit of the flavor and detail that seems a little overwhelming when the narrative actually begins.
When COM begins, Alicia is still outside the Homeland area having undergone some horrible brutalization there. She makes her plans to find Zero and kill him, thus ending the viral line. Peter, Sara, Hollis, Caleb, and Kate have started new lives in Kerrville, Texas. Amy is presumed dead, destroyed in the final battle of The Twelve. Here the narrative jumps around a bit in time. The characters age, and the entire population of Kerrville, some 200,000 strong, starts to disperse into outlying townships, beyond the protective walls of the city, as people begin to assume the viral threat is over.
However, Fanning, the Zero, has other plans. He intends to finish what he started, the annihilation of the human race. Cronin spends a few chapters getting into Fanning's backstory. His love of Lear's wife Liz, her premature death, his own breakdown afterwards, and the depths of despair that led him to go about his vicious genocide. To be honest, I thought this ran on a bit long, and mostly because it turns out that even though this stuff makes you understand Fanning, it doesn't make him sympathetic. I kind of found him to be a pathetic whiner.
But then, the story gets down to business. And the threat to Kerrville, and a vastly aged Peter and co. - they are now in their 50s - must deal with the threat of a new viral horde. The tension Cronin builds in these chapters is incredible. He's really the master at taking things in directions you never see coming. The chapters also give you a good idea of just how worthy an adversary Fanning is for our friends; how he overpowers and out-thinks even Amy. (Spoiler - sorry, you didn't really think Amy was going to die in the second book did you?)
It was strange to see my friends all grown old. I think Peter, Hollis, Sara and Michael are all permanently in their 20s in my mind - as I am in my own. Peter makes an observation at one point that looking in the mirror is strange because your reflection sometimes does not match your own perception of yourself. This resonated with me, as for sometime now the adult transformation or epiphany I thought would arrive has left me as I always have been, me, still me, in a slightly older body.
The ending of the book went on a bit long. Cronin does a wonderful job wrapping up every story line (except maybe Michael's) to let you know what becomes of all our friends, where the Book of Twelves comes from, and how the Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period comes about. The fascinating thing about the epilogue, occurring 1000 years after the events in the first book, is how it makes you think of time. The reader has just left our friends and 900 years later, we are with a new character who is puzzling over the way time and distance distort and challenge historians. They have airplanes again? And industry? But yes of course, it's 900 years later. Look at how far our own world has come in 900 years.
That being said, I also wouldn't have minded a little bit of mystery at the end, with Cronin allowing me to make up my own mind about the passage of time for our characters. Open-ended stories that left them wandering in my mind for some time to come. All in all COM was a great book, although I thought the Passage and the Twelve were a bit better. I'm so satisfied with the ending. But . . . I miss my friends.
4.5/5 Stars.
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