It's been a while since I finished listening to Tabloid City. It's style and tone reminded me a lot of Lush Life, which I read some time ago.The problem with Tabloid City is that my listening experience was messed up. Why is it that when publishers put out a book on CD, they can't title all the tracks on all the discs the same way? The first few CDs were rolling along fine, and then somewhere around the middle of the book, the track names had changed on the CDs, so they were playing out of order on my iPod playback. Fail, Little, Brown & Co.
I feel like I can't really give this book a fair review because of that. I can say that, despite the middle couple of discs' worth of tracks being out of order, the story moved. It's a detective story, an homage to the old days of crime and news, a tale in the classic style.
The story takes place over 24 hours -- much like the TV show I think, though I've never seen more than about 15 minutes of any given episode -- and follows a dozen or so characters around New York as the truth of the murder gets closer and closer to the surface. As the book goes on, the perspective changes with more frequency, driving the plot. On audio, it could be a little bit hard to listen to, because if you spaced out even for a second and missed the name of the next narrator, you were lost for a while trying to figure out what was happening.
I wasn't into it enough to listen to it again and make sure everything is in the right order. But even despite the hangups, I enjoyed the tale, and the oddly nostalgic look at some of the nastier parts of Mr. Hamill's city.
How annoying!
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