I feel like this turned into the literary version of the Matrix films because what the hell just happened? Here's the thing, I thought the Passage was incredible when I read it, all the way back in 2010 but then The Twelve kind of lost me and City of Mirrors, well, here we are. I think Cronin has a fantastic writing style and I really like the way he tells stories. The problem here is me, because I got caught out reading a freshly published first in a series. Old me didn't realise how annoying that is, current me knows better. Thank you for approving this title for me and I'm sorry it has taken so long for me to review it (even though I read it a while ago.)

The Twelve have been defeated and with them, the hordes of virals that sprung from their bloodlines. Amy is gone and Alicia has fled into the wilderness, her infection forcing her to seek isolation. As the years pass, the people of Kerrville grow complacent: they are safe, the virals no longer a threat and they begin to re-inhabit the country, leaving the walls of the city behind for the open country and the chance of a normal life. But Zero, the creature who was once a man named Timothy Fanning, has been biding his time, waiting for the right moment, that moment when the remains of humanity have forgotten to fear the virals, assuring his victory. But the survivors of First Colony have long memories, big dreams and a secret weapon that could well tip the balance in their favour in the epic war that looms on the horizon.

It is almost four years since the second volume of Justin Cronin’s Passage Trilogy, The Twelve, left us on a cliff-hanger. The final volume, The City of Mirrors, picks up eight months after those events, but dwells there only briefly before transporting us over twenty years into the future to a world that is much changed from the one we saw during the earlier volumes. Our band of heroes – the survivors of First Colony and those they picked up along the way – have separated over the years each going their own way, doing their best to find their own place in this new and seemingly viral-free world. Virals haven’t been spotted since the liberation of Homeland and the destruction of The Twelve and, as a result, humanity have largely forgotten their fears and begin to spread throughout the land, shunning the protective city walls that they believe they no longer need.

[Behind every great hatred is a love story.]

In some ways The City of Mirrors is about tying off any loose ends, answering any lingering questions that might remain from The Passage and The Twelve. Foremost of these, of course, is the story behind Timothy Fanning, the first man to be infected by the virus, and who we have therefore known as Zero throughout the series. While The Twelve – the first twelve people that Fanning infected, rapists and murderers all – have been destroyed, Fanning still lives, spending his time in the empty halls of Grand Central Station, reliving the moment of his heartbreak – the catalyst for his eventual infection – again and again for over a century. And it is, as you might expect, a love story, the tale of forbidden love that comes to a sudden and bitter end, driving Timothy Fanning first to murder, and then to the Bolivian jungle where his fate awaited. It’s not the first time in the series that Cronin has taken us inside the head of one of the virals, nor even the first time that we’ve been inside the head of Zero himself, but this visit presents the reader with an interesting challenge even while it helps us to understand the mind-set of this creature who has brought the world to its knees: Cronin presents the human Fanning and, in the process of laying out his tale, makes him a sympathetic and even likeable person, then leaves us to reconcile this before picture with the reality of the after that has driven much of the trilogy’s storyline.

In a very revealing moment that can only be described as soul-destroying, Cronin points to the banality of the destruction of humanity as we now know it, the single lynchpin that defined the moment between life and destruction, and leaves the reader with the overpowering sense that it really is as simple as all that.

[Not an hour would have gone by, her body grown cold in my embrace, before I would have followed her from this world. That, too, was part of my design.]

The City of Mirrors is something of a different beast from the two preceding volumes. For much of its duration, the virals are missing from the storyline and what the characters seem to be seeing – though as readers we know very differently – is a life of comparative normality stretching ahead of them. It’s a testament to Cronin’s skill as a storyteller that he can keep the reader’s interest even while not very much is happening: the characters have grown older and seemingly wiser, though not all content with their lot. While Peter Jaxon – in one of the two lives he seems to be living – is now the president of the Texas Republic and is happy to let people move outside the walls of its capital, Kerrville, Michael Fisher is convinced that there is still trouble ahead and has found a container ship that he is attempting to make seaworthy in order to get himself and as many people as he can recruit off the continent, convinced that the supposed barrier erected around the country’s waters is nothing more than a legend designed to contain the people in times when the technology was still reliable.

As these two individual strands, and the strands of a half-dozen other characters, converge and separate only to converge again at some later point, Cronin teases the reader with hints of what is still to come. Around the halfway point, he catches us unawares, and brings the horror of what the virals are in a single, innocent-seeming sentence:

[As he knelt to look, he heard a high-pitched clicking above his head.]

That clicking is a sound that haunts anyone who has read the earlier volumes and when we hear it here, it comes with a rush of adrenaline and puts us on our guard.

No-one will be disappointed with the epic battle to which the story is inevitably building, but it is the book’s final section that touches the reader the most, and ends the trilogy in some considerable style. From the opening pages of The Passage, we have seen many extracts from “The Book of Twelves” and references to “the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period”. As the trilogy comes to a close, Cronin takes us to the Indo-Australian Republic and introduces us to some of the attendees of the conference, culminating in a beautiful moment that gives the ultimate closure to the story of The Girl From Nowhere and the people who loved her. It is only after the fact that we can stop to realise just how much of the story Cronin must have planned in advance and of the work involved in making everything hang together.

Without a doubt the best of the trilogy, The City of Mirrors provides a satisfying conclusion to the story started over six years ago. I can almost guarantee that readers will come away from this volume with an intense desire to go back to the start and read through to the end. It’s a project I will be undertaking myself in the near future. Justin Cronin is a master storyteller and his post-apocalyptic vision stands alongside the genre’s finest. With The City of Mirrors, a wonderful story in its own right, he also shows an ability to deliver on the promises he made in earlier volumes. An engrossing plot coupled with characters who are at once familiar and strangely changed – whether because of the four years that have passed in real time since we last met them, or because of the twenty years that have passed in the course of the narrative it is difficult to say – brings a fitting close to one of the best pieces of horror fiction produced in the past decade. This is hopefully not the last the genre has heard of Justin Cronin. I can’t help but recommend this – and the preceding two volumes of what can only be described as his masterpiece – unreservedly.

Yep, it is not finished. The fight start from the Zero - and the pun is very much intended, as here we meet Zero, the first and last of The Twelve. And before he was a scientist - named Tim Fanning.

I have a love/hate relationship with this series. It is seriously PROLONGED, it has so much of unnecessary plots and motifs and one must truly believe in the mythology/philosophy of the novel to truly enjoy it. Yet there is a lot of warmth, understanding and forgiveness present, too. This truly is not the series about the vampires - it is the series about humanity. And this covers the many sins - but not the sins of boredom and irrationality, no (and this is how I felt when reading so many of the pages). Yet, the strong humanistic message wins this battle. You see? Love/hate relationship :)

I have been waiting for what seems like forever for the final instalment which did mean that I struggled slightly to remember the back stories of the characters.
I loved finding out Fanning's story and thought this tied things up nicely

A fitting end to an amazing trilogy, where all the ends are satisfyingly tied-up - and where the character of Amy achieves her true arc.

I remember reading The Passage years ago and really enjoying it. So when I read The Twelve, admittedly only last year, I was not feeling it and was disappointed. It took me hundreds of pages to get back into the story and even then it did not really succeeded. With this information, I was a bit afraid to start with The City of Mirrors, but I wanted to finish the series, and also prevent another huge gap between books.

It was okay. There were parts that I enjoyed, and others that just seemed to be so much filler without actually adding something. Strangely enough though, the part I liked best was Zero's back story. He really fleshed out the characters, and I think this is why I've heard so much great things about his non-fantasy novels. I would certainly pick up one of those books.

However, the survivalist story I liked less. They all feel very safe with the Twelve defeated, but of course, now that there is a new novel, you already know it can't last. It didn't feel very surprising at all, and also to me it was not the last stand that so epic a series (in number of pages at least) should be deserving.

Like I said, I was slightly disappointed with The City of Mirrors, but as Justin Cronin really knows how to portray his characters, I will certainly read more from him in the future!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

This is a very fitting end to a trilogy that's original and compelling. In parts, it reads like a campus novel, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition to the relentless horror of the virals. There are parts where the pacing lags a little, mostly towards the beginning of the novel and I felt that the epilogue, while interesting, was a little bit too long. That being said, Cronin has crafted a narrative that grips you utterly. His characters are well rounded and emotionally convincing and he ensures that his scenarios are believable, despite being in the midst of a vampire apocalypse. The trilogy as a whole has been a real pleasure and I would recommend the books to anyone who likes their vampires evil as opposed to romantic leads. This is a satisfying conclusion to a series that for me, was a revelation.