This review is from Marion, who is a college student, a very amateur short story writer, and a proud nerd, who got into romances and found SBTB over COVID.

…

I’m a bit of a map geek, and picked up The Cartographers expecting a decent thriller plot with a little information about old maps woven in. It turned out rather differently than I’d expected, but I was happy about that.

The plot setup: Nell Young is a cartographer and archivist who was fired from the New York Public Library and had her career ruined by her own father, a legendary cartographer. Nell found a box of old, extremely valuable maps in the uncategorized library archives, including a seemingly random map of the kind that are passed out for free at gas stations. Her father insisted that the maps were fake, and used his reputation to get Nell and her then-boyfriend fired.

Seven years later, her father dies, and Nell finds the gas-station map, which is more or less worthless, in her father’s desk. Desperate for some sense of closure around her firing and her father’s death, Nell starts investigating the map and why it might be so important.

As it turns out, “phantom settlements,” fake streets or towns added to maps as copyright traps, exist in some form in the real world, but can only be accessed by people with the correct map. This particular gas station map has the fake town of Agloe on it, and is the last surviving copy of the map. Back in the eighties, Nell’s parents and their friends from college, the titular Cartographers, found the town of Agloe and intended to map it and release the maps to the world, but the group fell apart and Agloe stayed secret until the present day.

First off, the cartography and all the talk about maps was absolutely glorious. All the characters are passionate about maps, and that very much comes across in the story; cartography is their life, not just their job. We get plenty of little details thrown in that aren’t story-relevant but are fascinating, and provide more depth to the characters. Antique maps, modern mass-produced maps, and even fictional maps all come into the story. It’s a welcome change from just using a character’s job as a backdrop, or to prod the story along. There’s also some interesting discussion of maps versus reality, the real purpose of a map, and how map usage is changing in the digital age, but it never overwhelmed the story. If I were to grade the story on the maps alone, it would be an A, no questions asked.

The thriller plot outside of the maps didn’t change my life, but it was a solid, interesting page turner. We find out who the killer is fairly early on (I would mark that as a spoiler, but come on, it’s never actually natural causes), and most of the story is an explanation of how the killer ended up in this situation, and where he is now. A whydunnit rather than a whodunnit, if you will.

Much of the story is told via flashbacks, through Nell’s parents’ friends explaining what happened in Agloe. Overall, it’s a fairly compelling portrayal of a group of friends falling apart because of all the secrets they keep, and it explains how we got to the modern day, although I do think some parts could have been better fleshed out. I guessed some plot twists, and the thriller plot never did anything truly stunning, but I’d give the thriller plot a solid B+ for being a fun read.

Other, smaller aspects I liked: the romance subplot. Felix, Nell’s boyfriend, took her side in the argument with her dad, and got fired along with her. The strain led them to break up in the aftermath, and Felix is now working on a map for a (fictional) tech company, one that’s intended to use so much data that it can effectively predict the future. Nell reluctantly brings Felix into her investigation of the map early on, because they work in very different fields of cartography and she thinks Felix’s skills will be relevant. It’s clear there are still some feelings on both sides. Overall, the romance was incorporated into the plot effectively.

One element that didn’t bother me, but might change your opinion about the romance:

It’s a very minor part of the book, but I also appreciated the casual representation in it. Felix, half of the group of The Cartographers, and many minor characters are people of color. It’s treated very casually in the narrative. Another minor character, one of Felix’s colleagues, is married to another woman, and it’s again treated like something very ordinary.

The book did have some issues, a lot of which are related to the rather quick wrap-up at the end. It’s primarily a thriller and not a romance, so long emotional conclusions aren’t really genre-typical, but it still feels like a weirdly quick finale.

Finally, I also had a problem with the author telling me about characters’ emotions and motivations, rather than showing ). Once every few chapters, I saw a sentence of the format “she felt sad for reasons, and also upset for reasons, and some other emotion for other reasons.” The characters also consistently describe one person as willing to do anything to make the Cartographers get along and keep them together, and his actions don’t really merit the constant mentions. In other places, emotions are woven into the plot and narration, but there are a few moments that were jarring to me.

Overall, the plot was good and the map talk was fascinating, but the book did have some issues, particularly with the ending, which dragged it down. It’s a gloriously geeky thriller, and would certainly appeal to readers who like characters who solve a mystery with extreme amounts of competence while revealing the details of a little-known field of work.