I was going to make this short: I can't say much about the plot or characters, because that would spoil the first two books of this trilogy. But there's so much going on, and so much to talk about, and so many, many pages, that I'm not sure "short" counts for anything here.
The City of Mirrors is the finish of a thousand year story begun in The Passage. As we open enough time has passed since the second book, The Twelve, that younger members of an apocalypse-surviving human community have come to think the deadly "virals" they've heard of are just scary stories. The last outpost of humanity, Kerrville, Texas, is bursting at the seems in a spreading civilization that harkens back to the Old West.
Both the rest of humanity and the virals seem to be extict, although one small group of survivors have been trying to repair a ship that might take them exploring, and a few others are scattered here and there.
But all is, naturally, not what it seems. At about the same time the survivors learn they may, indeed, be the last humans on Earth, the final Big Bad makes his appearance: Zero, the one who came before The Twelve. And he's got surprises waiting.
There's enough backstory here that you could read The City of Mirrors as a standalone, but I wouldn't recommend it. Justin Cronin brings all the strings together, including the ones you didn't even know were there, and his final act is immensely satisfying to those who've seen the story all the way through. Spreadsheets? Markable walls all over his house, covered with family trees and notes? I don't know how he does it. But I submit that he's actually better at these sprawling sagas than George R.R. Martin, who sometimes seems to enjoy mystifying his readers about who the heck these people are, and where they heck they've been.
My only issue is that there's one huge--and I mean HUGE--flashback involving Zero, the sort-of-villain who's been ahead of everyone else from the beginning. We find out in detail exactly why he ends up where he is, and what drives him. It's not that it's not interesting. The story of Zero's life, and how he ends up at the epicenter of a civilization-ending epidemic, is fascinating. It's just that it goes into an amazing amount of detail that the reader doesn't really need to know, in a book that's already so long that Chuck Norris could stand on it to punch out Godzilla. You could skip a lot of it ... but you won't know which parts, until you reach the end of the story.
Oh, and what is The City of Mirrors? Well, that's revealed, but to give it away would be ... giving it away.
And then, to satisfy the "thousand year" thing I mentioned earlier, we go far, far into the future, to find out the results of our heroes' actions. It's the ultimate epilogue--and it works.
I highly recommend the whole trilogy, and I'm impressed that Cronin clearly wasn't winging it--he knew where all the characters, and his vast story, were going all along.
https://www.amazon.com/City-Mirrors-Novel-Passage-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B015BCWZWW
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