If Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler's love child were raised by Franz Kafka, the writing that emerged might resemble China Mieville's new novel.

Mieville is one of our most talented fabulists, and his work roams boldly across genre, but his astonishingly imagined worlds are uniquely his own.

In many ways, "The City & the City" is a stark departure from his earlier books. This is a detective novel, but gray, chilly and stripped down. You might wonder what new twist Mieville could possibly bring to a genre that already has hundreds of variations.

He's done so not by reimagining the classic detective character but by creating a surreal environment in which his sleuth must operate to solve the murder of a young woman who is found dumped near a bleak housing project on the first page.

Mieville's protagonist is Inspector Tyador Borlu of the Extreme Crime Squad of Beszel, a fictional city-state that Mieville locates in southeastern Europe. It's a decaying, depressed world reminiscent of the 1949 film "The Third Man," where shadows, paranoia, secrecy and unseen forces reign.

Then things get really twisty.

Beszel has a ghostly and unacknowledged doppelganger, a city-state called Ul Qoma that overlaps, or "crosshatches," with its twin, and it soon becomes clear that the dead girl has come from this mirror place whose very existence is a crime to acknowledge.

Within this Orwellian backdrop, Inspector Borlu must navigate the convoluted borders that separate the two cities. The paradox Borlu faces is this: To solve the crime, he must risk violating an even greater societal taboo than murder, one that could trigger his own disappearance.

Mieville is working at a high symbolic level here, but the reality he injects makes things feel familiar.

The existential story turns metaphysical when Borlu learns there may be a third city, the mysterious Orciny, straddling the cracks and interstices between Beszel and Ul Qoma.

Like his previous work, "The City" is an unabashed love letter to the diversity, polyglot sprawl, complexities, contradictions, pitfalls, humanity and street life of the metropolis.

Mieville mines the tropes of detective fiction -- the murder scene, the coroner's autopsy, the witnesses who saw nothing, the shadowy government figure and the sidekicks, but the book evokes our own fractured times as well.

The sundered cities of the book seem similar to wartime Sarajevo or Cold War Berlin. The mirror cities themselves, and the strange inner workings that make them, and their residents, tick are the real protagonists.