“City of Windows” by Robert Pobi – The Invisible Sharpshooter

Robert Pobi has taken his first dive into the police procedural genre by opening the Lucas Page series with City of Windows. It tells the story of Lucas, a retired and handicapped FBI agent who gets brought back into the fold for his unbelievable ability to analyze crime scenes.

More precisely, he is asked to put his talents to use to solve the murder of his former partner, shot by a sniper while on the move in an SUV. Before long, he finds himself fully back in the fold, on the hunt for a killer nobody knows anything about.

Robert Pobi Opens the Lucas Page Show

Urban warfare has a truly terrifying characteristic to it which can hardly be captured through any form of media imaginable. While the buildings we have erected are certainly a marvel and testament as to how far we have developed in the civil sense, they also happen to make excellent nests for anyone with a rifle and evil intentions.

I doubt any of us who remember the sniper murderer a couple of decades ago in the United States will forget the feeling of omnipresent dread he brought with him. The urban environment is the perfect chaos for this type of killer, and it's one Lucas Page will have to dive in head-first in City of Windows by Robert Pobi.

The story begins during a New York blizzard when an FBI agent gets shot by a sniper... while on the move in an SUV. The shot is largely considered impossible, especially when compounded with the weather conditions which hinder the investigation at every turn, quickly wiping away any evidence which may have been left behind.

The agent in charge of the case, Brett Kehoe, can't even locate where the shot came from... which is when he turns to the retired and handicapped FBI agent Lucas Page, a man with an uncanny ability to analyze crime scenes in his mind.

Missing an eye, an arm and a leg, Page would have refused Kehoe's request, were it not for one simple fact: the murdered FBI agent was Lucas' former partner.

Finding it difficult to refuse under such circumstances, Page sets out to hunt down a killer nobody has seen with an agenda nobody knows anything about. As it turns out, his partner's murder was only one among a series of victims fallen victim to impossible sniper shots.

The common thread between the victims is slipping away as the blizzard grows in strength, leaving Page with very little time to uncover the assassin's identity before he vanishes forever.

Sherlock Holmes, FBI

While there are certainly many things setting Lucas Page apart from Sherlock Holmes (starting with an actual family and physical disabilities), I couldn't help but think of him as a modern, FBI counterpart to the old icon.

Much of the book, as you might have guessed it, is dedicated to Page's analysis of the crime scenes and his interpretation of the evidence. In my opinion, this is the real hook which draws the reader into the rest of the story, for these sequences are written with a true brilliance.

Whenever Page enters the scene, he begins to analyze everything with mathematical precision, and this mostly without moving around much. The bulk of the work happens inside his head, and we are privy to how he lists through various options, breaks down all the possible angles and distances of the shooter, crunches numbers in his mind, all to arrive at a correct conclusion.

It's almost like watching a man do a machine's job, and the best part about it all is the author writes it in a believable enough fashion for us not to question the man's logic. He notices and observes the sorts of details which seem obvious in hindsight, and this is definitely not an easy task to accomplish for any author.

With this being said, don't think of Lucas Page as a robot who is simply there to interpret the evidence in front of him. While Pobi definitely left a lot of room for character development further down the road in this series, we get glimpses into Lucas' past and his current state of mind.

While to the outside world he might be an unrivalled genius in his field, inside he is a nearly broken man with aluminium body parts and a severe case of PTSD, only trying to protect his family and preserve what little normalcy remains in his world.

All in all, he ends up being a compelling protagonist who I'm curious to see developed further in the future.

Bullets of Conspiracy

Not every author can pull it off, but this is one procedural with a fairly quick pace to it. Neither Page nor his colleagues dwell too much on any crime scene or piece of evidence, with there always being a sense of urgency pushing them onward towards the next discovery.

To this end, the rest of the able-bodied cast surrounding our main character do a fantastic job at keeping their own sections of the plot moving forward. More often than not, they complement Page where he is lacking, and by the end of it I had the impression they all formed a single organism, for lack of a better description.

The hunt for the shooter is actually pretty exhilarating from start to finish as we are never short on curious facts to feed the inquisitive mind. Pobi did an excellent job at creating a sort of enthralling weirdness to his villain, which comes as a result of multiple factors ranging from his incomprehensible agenda to his handmade meteoric bullets and absurd sniping skills.

Though he certainly is in the wrong for dealing with his problems the way he does, I couldn't help but develop a form of sympathy for him as he started to grow increasingly human in my perception of him.

As we unravel the web of conspiracy, the author ensures we never have any time to get bored with the old, consistently introducing new side characters, even if some of them only stay for a few lines.

The diversity they present in their personalities and walks of life in general help lend the story an air of authenticity as well, reminding us Lucas and his team aren't the only people affected by what is happening.

Though things do get more complex as more people are pushed into the story, we never veer into “hard-to-follow” territory as the author ensures the main plot thread is unfolding smoothly in front of us at nearly all times.

The Final Verdict

City of Windows by Robert Pobi is an excellent procedural thriller and debut for the Lucas Page series, with its greatest strength being the way in which the main character works the evidence and the crime scenes.

It has compelling characters and an engrossing mystery waiting for the reader to explore it. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is into police procedural novels as well as thrillers in general.

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Robert Pobi Personal site Robert Pobi is an author and international bestseller who has nestled himself in the thriller genre. He has made a name for himself through his private nature and, somewhat counter-intuitively, lack of a media presence. So far, his most famous works include Bloodman, Harvest, and City of Windows, the latter of which became a bestseller in Canada.