City Without Stars by Tim Baker

Tim Baker burst onto the crime fiction scene with an outstanding debut, Fever City, a conspiracy thriller about the assassination of JFK. His follow up, City Without Stars, is in many ways a step change, focusing as it does on the Mexican drug wars. That said, there are similarities between the two, both being steeped in conspiracy, corruption and paranoia.

City Without Stars follows a Mexican police officer, Fuentes, and Pillar, a union official, as they both investigate the murder of women in the city of Ciudad Real. There have been 873 murders and all of them remain unsolved. If this story line sounds far-fetched, horrifically it is very much grounded in fact. Since 1993, the city of Ciudad Júarez has seen hundreds of murders of young women. Between 1993 and 2005 it is estimated that 370 women have been murdered, and while there have been some arrests, the murders have continued, and many Mexicans believe the real perpetrators remain undetected. So, this is the basis for City Without Stars, Baker’s protagonists trying to discover once and for all who is responsible for the mass femicide. 

Alongside Fuentes and Pillar, we have Ventura, a privileged American journalist also investigating the killings, Padre Marcio, a corrupt archbishop, and the psychopathic El Santos, who heads the local cocaine cartel. Throughout the novel their threads remain separate but move inexorably closer and the reader just knows that when they collide the results with be shattering. Without giving away spoilers, the author doesn’t disappoint and the denouement of all this is intense

The plot of City Without Stars, while primarily focused on femicide, encompasses two underlying threads: the corruption sown by the drug trade and the maquiladoras – the warehouse factories where women endure back-breaking work for pitiful wages and which are a product of the NAFTA agreement. Baker shows how each are two sides of the same coin of exploitation, symbiotic forces that grind down ordinary Mexicans, particularly women, between them. So as with Fever City, City Without Stars is a deeply political novel with much to say about the society within which it is set.

In less able hands this complex story of five inter-connected character arcs might become confusing, but Baker handles it all with assured aplomb. Under the pressure of tying all the strands together, a lesser author might have created clichéd or cardboard cut-out characters, but Baker gives us a set of three-dimensional protagonists and antagonists who come alive on the page. 

The Mexican drug wars have been the focus of great American writers – Sam Hawkens and the towering figure of Don Winslow to name but two – and City Without Stars is a worthy companion to the canon. Baker really encapsulates the sense of a state and society captured by the corruption engendered by the cocaine cartels, the fear that their impunity infects into every strand of everyday life. This is an assured follow up to the author’s debut and secures his place as one of the great crime novelists writing today.

5 out of 5 stars