Our first brush with Ezra Vale, an architectural savant with a taste for Brutalist symphonies tapped out on a steel ruler. And it is Nia Harrow's first too. They collide in a draughty studio off Clerkenwell Road, where Vale reads crime from paper fibers and graphite like notes on a staff. Soon Vale, with Harrow and DI Moira Llewellyn, is drawn into Scotland Yard's inquiry into two Americans found dead in an empty show flat near King's Cross, a rolled plan clenched in each fist. Trails lead through Rook & Tanner Architects to a transatlantic cabal reshaping cities in shadow.
Mixed bag for procedural pacing.
Blueprints for Deception hums with motifs about how we interpret cities, how power redraws streets, and how expertise can both illuminate and blind. Vale "hears crime in graphite as if it were a score on a staff", and that conceit lets the book braid ethics with method without lecturing. The deaths of the two Americans point to money, planning boards, and ambition, and the final notes ring urban, skeptical, and satisfying.
In this London of draughty studios and empty show flats near King's Cross, concrete becomes mood, the tap of a steel ruler stands in for a metronome, and the transatlantic cabal feels plausible enough to raise the hair, yet the city sometimes crowds the people who move through it, which left me admiring the atmosphere more than inhabiting it.
Ezra Vale lands as a genuine original, not a cartoon savant. He is precise to the point of poetry, and the way Nia Harrow prods at his methods with skepticism and curiosity makes their exchanges sparkle.
DI Llewellyn brings ballast, and the trio's dialogue has a dry musicality. I finished hoping their odd partnership has a long run.
I came for the investigation and the angle. Instead I got a metronome.
Compared with Eva Dolan's nimble procedural steps and Stuart Neville's taut atmospherics, this felt stilted. The rhythms never settle, and the beats repeat until they thud.
The steel ruler tap is cute once; by the fifth echo it is a tic. Scenes spiral around the draughty studio and that show flat without adding urgency, and the supposed cabal reads like fog.
By the time we looped back to Rook & Tanner and that show flat yet again, I was grinding my teeth. The stakes may be big, but the telling saps them.
Nope. This left me cold, exasperated, and eager to read something else.
Vale's steel-ruler percussion echoes in the prose: sentences snap; chapters end on resonant beats. The structure keeps returning to that chilly Clerkenwell studio as a motif, then fans out into interviews, plans, and quiet deductions that feel earned.
The case about two Americans in a show flat grows in clarity without cheap tricks, and the switches between Nia, Vale, and DI Moira are clean. If a few transitions feel studied, the architectural throughline gives the book its backbone.
