Contemporary fantasy. Peter Grant, Metropolitan Police constable and
magician, investigates the death of a man found stabbed on Baker
Street station.
The plot starts in a fairly conventional way, with unexpected
evidence found on the murder scene, and gradual following of its
implications into some fairly unexpected places. This works quite
well, with no sudden cliff between normal (admittedly magically-aided)
police work and dealing with the things that come up as a result of
it. The subplots are less well-integrated: one deals with an attempt
to trace a group of magicians partly uncovered in Moon Over Soho,
another deals with an outsider being brought partly into the fold, but
both of them are clearly setup for future books and come as rather
clunking changes of pace from the main investigation. And once more
Aaronovitch does his annoying trick of eliding a significant series of
events near the climax so that he can hint knowingly at them later.
Alas, there's still not enough of the lovely sense of place in
London that made the first book stand out so well. There's some of
Aaronovitch's usual good description of locations, but apart from
architectural notes it's largely happening in the Underground tunnels
and sewers, rather than places the typical reader might actually have
visited. There is plenty of London history, and it's well-integrated
with the core mystery, with only the occasional obvious infodump.
I do feel that if you're going to poke fun at grammar, you should get
it right:
The school […] was […] where countless generations of the Peckwater
Estate had been educated, including me and Abigail. Or, as
Nightingale insists it should be, Abigail and I.
No, it shouldn't, and Nightingale wouldn't make that mistake. Putting
the noun before the pronoun is quite separate from putting the pronoun
in the right case.
Lesley May is back on stage after her near-absence from Moon over
Soho, and now part of the magical organisation. How she doesn't
simply take over from Grant isn't clear; she seems to be better than
him at pretty much everything except the magic she hasn't had as long
to learn. An outsider here is the FBI agent Kimberley Reynolds,
brought in when it becomes clear that the victim was American and
well-connected; she mostly serves as a mundane viewpoint, since Grant
and May are now reasonably familiar with the magical world, but feels
like an intrusion from a different sort of book, perhaps deliberately.
Or perhaps the author's reaching for an American audience, but then
he'd probably have painted her as a bit less trigger-happy. (And the
jacket blurb is completely misleading about her. Maybe it was written
from an earlier version?)
This book feels as though the series is getting into its groove. It's
distinctly better than the uneven Moon over Soho, though for me not
quite back to the level of Rivers of London.
"Much as I love standing knee-deep in shit," said Kumar, "it would be
a really bad idea to hang around here much longer."
"Why's that?" I asked.
"The water level's rising," he said. "In fact, as the senior officer
here I think I'm going to insist." He stared at us, obviously
expecting one of us to object.
"You had us at 'the water level's rising,'" I said.
Followed by Broken Homes.
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