This is one of those books that you admire more than love, I think - at least that's the case for me. Reading it was a bit of an odd experience. It was clearly competent and intelligent but I couldn't seem to connect to any of the characters, and I was thinking as I read that because of this I'd probably give it two stars, but the more I read the more I realised that the whole point was this sense of alienation, of disconnection, and that it was a deliberate choice on the part of the author. And as I realised this I began to appreciate The Ruined Map for what it was: a text more concerned with atmosphere and feeling than with plot. There's a very Kafka-esque vibe going on here, as the detective given the job of searching for a missing man becomes ever more alienated from the world around him. His marriage is falling apart, the case is a total dead-end full of small shifting instabilities, and more and more he comes to identify with the missing man until his final alienation is from himself, and he loses all sense of his own identity. It's a weird, claustrophobic sort of read as the world breaks down and reforms around the protagonist, and it's really cleverly done.