Ben Aaronovitch

Peter Grant — (2010-2011) Midnight Riot was also published as Rivers of London in the UK. Publisher: Probationary Constable Peter Grant dreams of being a detective in London’s Metropolitan Police. Too bad his superior plans to assign him to the Case Progression Unit, where the biggest threat he’ll face is a paper cut. But Peter’s prospects change in the aftermath of a puzzling murder, when he gains exclusive information from an eyewitness who happens to be a ghost. Peter’s ability to speak with the lingering dead brings him to the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who investigates crimes involving magic and other manifestations of the uncanny. Now, as a wave of brutal and bizarre murders engulfs the city, Peter is plunged into a world where gods and goddesses mingle with mortals and a long-dead evil is making a comeback on a rising tide of magic.

Midnight Riot

Peter Grant is a constable-in-training in London’s police force. At the end of his probation period, it looks like he’s in line for a long career of boring desk work in the Case Progression Unit, but that all changes when he draws the luckless duty of guarding a crime scene overnight where, earlier that day, a headless body was found lying on the street. While Peter is freezing his heels off in the cold London night, he is approached by possibly the crime’s only witness — who also happens to be a ghost...

Peter is swiftly recruited into a secret department that focuses on the supernatural and magical, and apprenticed to the mysterious Thomas Nightingale, the leader and only other active member in this centuries-old department. Peter begins the long process of learning exactly how magic works and, at the same time, investigating who is responsible for the headless corpse, which will lead him on a complex and surprising adventure on the streets — and rivers — of London.

So begins Midnight Riot, the first book in the Peter Grant series by Ben Aaronovitch — and the good news is that it’s simply a blast from start to finish. The novel is fast-paced and exciting from the get-go, and there’s barely any let-up in the action until you’ve turned the final page. It almost reads like a particularly exciting episode of a good detective TV series (just add magic), which makes perfect sense because Ben Aaronovitch has written extensively for TV, including two Doctor Who serials. Then again, he also knows how to describe visuals in such a way that you don’t need a picture to get what he’s talking about. His prose is consistently witty and never boring. Take, for example, this description of a building in London:

City of Westminster Magistrates' Court is around the back of Victoria Station on the Horseferry Road. It's a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning. Inside, the waiting areas maintained the unique combination of cramped busyness and barren inhumanity that was the glory of British architecture in the second half of the twentieth century.

The novel is full of this type of quirkily effective prose, and the dialogues are likewise snappy and snarky (especially Peter’s, who sounds like a less annoying version of, well, almost every John Scalzi character). Combine that with the rapid but steady pace of the plot and you end up with one of those books you occasionally look up from, realizing you’ve been reading much longer than you thought.

Peter Grant is the most well-defined character in the novel, mainly because Ben Aaronovitch deftly balances Peter’s various struggles throughout the book. On the one hand, he’s trying to master his magic (there are hints that magic has a methodical, even scientific underpinning going back to centuries of research) and investigating the strange, random murders occurring in London, but he’s also a bachelor in the city, dealing with the various young women he encounters, including an attractive colleague and the female personification of a Thames tributary (the original title of the novel is Rivers of London). Also, because Peter has a mixed-race background, the novel gives an interesting look at what life’s like for vaguely Arabic-looking young men in modern day London, especially when he’s out of uniform. The other characters in the novel never reach the same level of depth as Peter, but then again, this isn’t a novel you read for the deep character studies. It’s a fun, fast story, part police procedural (Aaronovitch has evidently done his research) and part urban fantasy, but it’s best not to take it too seriously and just go along for the ride.

As for the main intrigue, set in motion by the headless corpse in the very first chapter but quickly becoming more and more involved — I’m not going to spoil it for you here. Suffice it to say that I didn’t see the big twist coming at all. Once Ben Aaronovitch suddenly puts the various pieces together (at right about the start of chapter 8), I was extremely surprised and very impressed. Even more promising are the hints that this is just the start of a larger story, as we’re sure to learn more about the nature of magic, the history of Peter’s mentor Thomas Nightingale and his mysterious maid Molly, and several other items that are only hinted at in this first volume of the PETER GRANT series (book 2, Moon over Soho, is due on March 1st).

On the book’s cover, Diana Gabaldon describes Midnight Riot as “[…] what would happen if Harry Potter grew up and joined the Fuzz.” This is a good sound bite and probably will get many people to pick up the novel, but if you really need a comparison, it’s probably more accurate to go for something like Mike Carey’s Felix Castor series or even Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. Regardless of comparisons, Midnight Riot is an excellent novel: it reads like a breeze but has just enough substance to keep you coming back for more. If you’ve read my reviews in the past, you may know I’m not a huge urban fantasy fan, but this novel was so refreshing and fun that I’m eager to read more of Peter Grant’s adventures soon. —Stefan Raets

Moon over Soho

A promising jazz drummer is found dead of a heart attack shortly after playing a gig in London. At first, the only odd circumstance surrounding his death is the fact that Peter Grant, apprentice wizard and police constable, faintly hears the notes of the jazz standard “Body and Soul” rising from the corpse, indicating that magic was somehow involved in the musician’s death. However, when further research reveals that several jazz musicians have died in similar circumstances over the years, it suddenly becomes much more urgent for Peter and his supervisor Thomas Nightingale to find out what’s really going on...

So begins Moon over Soho, the second book in the Peter Grant series by Ben Aaronovitch. Let’s get the most important news out of the way first: if you enjoyed Midnight Riot (or Rivers of London, as it’s called outside of the US), you’ll love Moon over Soho. The new novel does just about everything its predecessor did so well, but a little better and with enough new twists to make you wish the third book in the series was already on the shelves.

One of the reasons Moon over Soho is an even more fun read than the first book is the fact that it doesn’t have to spend as much time setting things up for the reader. We already know who police constable and apprentice wizard Peter Grant is, we know about Thomas Nightingale and his secret magical department in the London police force, we have some background about how magic works, we know about the Folly. Thanks to all of this, Ben Aaronovitch can kick the story into high gear right from the beginning, with Peter’s investigation into the jazz drummer’s death (and into another seemingly unrelated but much more gruesome incident) quickly setting up a few side-plots and new characters. At the same time, there’s space in the story to fill the reader in on things like Thomas Nightingale’s past and the history of magic in England, and to throw in hilarious side-bars such as the goofy way of determining the strength of residual magic by measuring how loud Toby the dog barks (“0.5 milliyaps”). 

The cover’s catchphrase is “Magic and murder to a jazz beat”, which is surprisingly appropriate in several ways. Jazz is a running theme throughout the novel, from the drummer who is found dead in the opening chapter to Peter’s father, a famous jazz musician in his day, who plays a more important role in Moon over Soho than in the first book. There’s a comical group of side-characters called “the irregulars” who are all jazzmen (or at least wannabe jazzmen) and who will hopefully appear in future novels. Several chapters bear the title of famous jazz songs or albums. And finally, this may be a stretch but the book is written in what I’d pretentiously like to call a highly propulsive style. That’s probably not a real jazz term at all, but nevertheless, the fact that the story rarely slows down (and when it does, it’s for a good reason) makes Moon over Soho hard to put down and never boring. It’s like one of those songs you can’t help but tap your foot along to.

Going back to that cover for a moment: Neth Space has an excellent article up about the noticeable difference between the US and UK covers. It’s painfully obvious they’re different, and while the term “white-washing” is not entirely appropriate (given that the model’s actually turned into a black silhouette), it’s still hard to imagine why Del Rey felt the need to change these covers in this day and age.

Regardless, Ben Aaronovitch delivers another winner with Moon over Soho, a realistic modern day police procedural (aside from all the magic, of course) populated by increasingly solid characters and written in the same consistently witty style as the first Peter Grant novel. It features a gripping mystery plot with some truly creepy, borderline horror elements and a few incredibly tense action scenes. Moon over Soho is one of the most entertaining books I’ve read in a long time, and really made me look forward to the next installment in the Peter Grant series. Check it out, even if (like me) you usually don’t enjoy urban fantasy. —Stefan Raets