The Launch of Toby Ball's Invisible Streets

A desperate cop running out of time. An aging radical searching for an answer. A right-hand man questioning his moral compass. These are just three of the many characters that inhabit author Toby Ballʼs fictional City, a New York-like metropolis full of depravity and dissolution. Invisible Streets, the third book in Ballʼs City trilogy, brings readers back to his noir playground for criminals, corrupt politicians, cops, and those civilians trying to scrape by amidst the chaos. At odds with the population is newcomer Nathan Canada, a Robert Moses-type urban planner determined to change the Cityʼs landscape and destroy anyone who gets in his way. 

When dynamite is stolen from one of Canadaʼs construction sites, Detective Torsten Grip is put on a case that leads him into the underbelly of the City, a path he canʼt turn back from, and one that brings him face-to-face with journalist Frank Frings, one of the last remaining activists of a long-gone generation. Together the two men, often on opposite ends of the political spectrum (and occasionally the law), must work together to find the connections between the disappearing dynamite, a mysterious group of radicals known as Kollectiv 61, and secret drug research being conducted on the nearby university campus.  

With a nod to those noir writers who came before him, Toby Ball fills Invisible Streets with characters with gray-area morality, a dark metropolis setting, and enough twists to keep readers guessing until the last moment. More than your average page-turner, Invisible Streets is a meditation on urban planning, ambitious overdevelopment, and what happens when improvement comes at the cost of displacing a cityʼs poor.