Truly spectacular
B.A. Shapiro's 'Metropolis' as close to perfect as it gets

Let’s get right to where the rubber meets the road this time and not pussyfoot around like you always do when it comes to laying out cash for a hardcover book. 

You’ll drop 40 bucks for dinner in a restaurant or $8 for a glass of wine, but you get hesitant to spend $28 on a hardcover book that’ll relieve your anxiety and psychic pain for many blissful hours while dinner is forgotten even before you get home.

I’m here for you today, as I am the first week of every month, to help make you smarter and happier. I don’t want to embarrass you or make you feel guilty, but I’m nearly certain that even the most dedicated readers of Murder Ink do not always buy the most outstanding crime fiction books published and reviewed each month in this column. But, I won’t let you mix up your priorities this go-round and forego a truly spectacular book.

Two weeks ago, on May 17, Algonquin Books released B.A. Shapiro’s 10th novel, “Metropolis.” Shapiro hit the charts with “The Collector’s Apprentice” and “The Art Forger,” but “Metropolis” is in a class of its own, and stunning. “Metropolis” – and this is a long throw for me – may just be the most captivating book I’ve read in years. Now I don’t want to depreciate the excellence or engrossing reading experience of any of the preeminent books I’ve shared with you, but “Metropolis,” in my opinion, is as close to perfect as it gets. It had me reading at stoplights. 

Metropolis Storage Warehouse is the name of a 123-year-old public storage building in Cambridge, Mass. It is 480 feet long, 90 feet wide, six stories high and contains 400 storage units of various sizes and configurations. Up until page one of this book, the warehouse had been owned for the past 10 years by Zach Davidson, who we now join as an auctioneer barks out the rules for viewing and bidding on the contents in each storage space as locks are cut and doors opened.

Besides Zach, a likable, fringy guy we all know somebody like – in wrinkled shirts, in need of a haircut and a dog or wife – has been in various bunko schemes and obtained the Metropolis mostly by being in the wrong place at the right time in the hustle of street drugs. “Metropolis” follows the lives of six very unordinary, lovable characters who live or work in their storage units. 

There is Serge, an unstable but brilliant street photographer, who lives in his darkroom with hundreds of undeveloped rolls of film; Marta, an immigrant from Venezuela who overstayed her visa and is finishing a dissertation for an advanced degree at Boston University; Jason, a disillusioned corporate lawyer making his office in one of the storage units; and Liddy, tormented wife of a rich and ruthless real estate developer who recreates her pre-teenage bedroom in her unit while her kids are forced to attend boarding school in Switzerland. And there’s Rose, the tenured office manager, who keeps the surcharge from illegal residents to augment her husband, Vince’s, job, feed her two young daughters and incentivize a better life than her teenage son Michael is pursuing on the street.

Shapiro uses short chapters alternating between these characters as a timeline to tell the tension-filled stories that present a dismal but always promising – or maybe just hopeful – future for self-exiled castaways. And this tension among the characters and their circumstances is calculated foreshadowing for the reader; we know there will not be a happy ending for anyone, including us. But the characters we come to know so well just cannot come to a worse ending than the worse beginning they’ve found themselves deteriorating in and have drawn us into. And the reader can’t read fast enough. Shapiro is a damn fine tease.

And that’s all you get to know about “Metropolis.” Well, maybe one more thing, encroaching dangerously close to a plot spoiler: Shapiro has created a gauzy, lovely and thoroughly tenable love interest among two of the protagonists that’s heartwarming and a delight to witness. 

But I do need to remind you not to forget to ask for your 15% Murder Ink discount at Maria’s Bookshop.