There are cities that glitter at night. And then there are cities that swallow light whole. Reading City Without Stars by Tim Baker felt like walking through one of the latter — a place where hope doesn’t disappear dramatically; it erodes quietly, layer by layer, until even the sky feels complicit. Set in Ciudad Real, a fictionalised border town echoing the tragedies of Juárez, the novel drops us into a landscape where cartel wars rage in the shadows and hundreds of women
What does it mean to race against time—not metaphorically, not poetically, but in the brutal, breath-snatching, pulse-in-your-throat way where every second could save a life or end one? I asked myself that question somewhere around 2 a.m., sitting alone with a cup of ginger tea gone cold, unable to put Jeffrey Archer’s End Game down. It’s funny how books sometimes choose their own reading conditions: silence outside, a faint hum of the ceiling fan, and a story that refuses to
