Roofworld

A first novel in which the humdrum life of a milquetoast editor becomes excessively exciting when he stumbles into the acrobatic, alternative world of the lost boys and girls who live their lives above the roofs of London. It's Peter Pan from Hell. Wimpy Robert Linden's search for the daughter of a murdered author leads him to Rose Leonard, the dead author's building super, an amusing young woman of many and shifting interests. Rose's current interest is photography, particularly the shadowy figures she's snapped swooping around the chimney pots above Regent Street. She's pretty sure that one of these aerialists in her pictures is Sarah, the missing literary heiress. Entranced by the energetic Rose, Robert joins her efforts to hook up with the elusive roof-dwellers and soon finds himself swooping from cornice to cornice, sliding at a terrifying speed on a network of cables rigged over the years by the generations of young people who have abandoned the treacherous world at street level for a utopian life in the sky. But their utopian world is cracking up. The roof-dwellers have split into rival camps, following either the evil Chymes or the purehearted Zalian. It's war, and bodies are dropping from the sky and into the lap of Police Inspector Hargreaves, who must find out what's going on. Hargreaves and Robert discover independently that the monstrous Chymes is planning an act of appalling and murderous brutality against the few remaining good roof-dwellers, and there is little time to stop him. Not quite science fiction, rich with startling imagery, this is a brooding and highly entertaining depiction of a seductive shadow city. (Kirkus Reviews)