This is a very interesting story written as a confession by Mitchell Sinclair about his adventures as he investigates why he is being chased, threatened, life destroyed... He is a lawyer who has a strange book tossed into his car at a toll booth on the way to work one day. From that point on his life never stops changing as he lives in constant fear and is forced to try to decipher the coded text in the book and chase leads given by the book trying to figure out what and why this is all happening to him. It takes him on a journey around the world as he changes from lawyer to survivor by any means necessary.
Very interesting story in which you don't know what comes next nor what twist on known historical references will occur next. ( )

City of Pillars tells the confessional story of Mitchell Sinclair whose life is turned upside down when a document is tossed into his car at a toll booth while crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. The document is written in several strange languages and there are men in black suits who want it back at any cost.

Mitchell travels to many places around the world in order to translate the document, while the men in black chase him everywhere. The quest to uncover the secret changes him and he finds himself doing whatever he must to survive.

It is an intriguing story although a little long winded at times and can be somewhat repetitive. ( )

Overall, this book transports the reader throughout the whole world (from Peru to the Middle East) in a fast-paced narration that never loses the reader. It is a confession of sorts of a man who has been entangled in a web of deceit that attempts to destroy him for this accidental intrusion. While there are lofty ideas in the novel that are unfolded in the midst of heart-stopping showdowns, the style is often childish (as the author tells rather than shows) and many events are not fully resolved (such as why disasters are covered up and how people manage not to notice). The City of Pillars has a good plot, but the mediocre style condescends to the reader's ability to infer. ( )

Having won this book from Librarything’s giveaway page I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I started out reading the confession of man but what was he confessing to? As I read further I realized this man was one who had been in the gerbil’s wheel racing to bigger and better lawyerly type things only to have seemingly randomly received a document that would change his life. At first I thought this was a book similar to The Celestine Prophecy type search to find the answer sort of book – a quest for knowledge. As I kept reading I began to see a man looking for answers but one who is taken from a straight arrow to an unethical rather paranoid man so intent on his goal and self preservation that nobody and nothing was valued any more. By the end of the book I began to wonder if the main character was sane at all or ever had been. I did look up Irem, The City of Pillars, online and found that it is mentioned in the Qu’ran and is supposedly the city of pillars that was so wicked it was smitten by the prophet Hod and God then driven into the sands of the Rub al Khali dessert – never to be seen again. Iram became known to Western literature with the translation of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights. The book is well written, drives the reader and is thought provoking in many ways. I was on the fence about giving it three or four stars but ended up with four due to the fact it “made me think.” ( )

This book was initially very promising. I felt that the author set a foundation for a entertaining thriller. What I found was a gradually declining inward philosophical journey into into the absurd. The writing was satisfactory but my interest in the story quickly disintegrated. ( )