Midnight Riot
The Rivers of London series, Book 1
Ben Aaronovitch
Del Rey
Fiction, Fantasy/Horror/Mystery
Themes: Cross-Genre, Diversity, Ghosts and Spirits, Hidden Wonders, Urban Tales, Vampires and the Undead, Wizards
**
Description
After two years as a probationary constable in London, Peter Grant's career aspirations appear to be headed for the wastepaper basket of the Case Progression Unit, glorified data entry to make the real detectives' work easier. But when he finds himself talking to a ghost about a recent murder, he comes to the attention of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, a man with an unusual reputation: he, alone of all of London's constabulary, is a trained wizard, investigating crimes with unnatural elements and through unconventional means. Peter didn't even believe in ghosts until he was talking to one, and now he's become an apprentice to a modern-day wizard. Plunged into the city's supernatural underbelly, he finds himself up to his eyebrows in feuding river spirits, ghostly apparitions, and monsters out of storybooks... not to mention a malevolent spirit that has just kicked off a spree of murder and mayhem unlike any he or his new master have seen before. Maybe that desk job with the Case Progression Unit wouldn't have been so bad, after all...
Review
There seems to be a belief among some authors (and screenwriters) that simply setting a story in a big city - like New York or London -
automatically makes it fascinating. There seems to be a further belief, particularly among authors, that describing every street, block, building,
brick, crack, and pothole in minute and historic detail, to the point where there's little to no room for an interesting plot or characters, makes a
story even more fascinating. To some people, this may well be true.
Unfortunately, I am not one of those people.
To be fair, the basic idea has plenty of potential, and it starts out interestingly enough, with a thick London flavor and rather dark sense of humor.
If the narrating voice of Peter Grant showed him to be rather shallow and more than a bit slow on the uptake (not to mention so easily distracted one
wonders how he remembers to lace up his shoes every morning, let alone hold down a job as a copper), well, I'd just met him, and surely that meant there
was plenty of room for improvement... though Aaronovitch sure went out of his way to make sure I appreciated the geography and history of Covent Garden,
the area where the first murder and ghostly encounter occur. Now, I don't mind a little setting and trivia, so long as I still get a decent story to go
with it, with characters I can find interesting. As the story progressed, I was still waiting for Peter to improve, to learn, to become interesting, to
grow on me as something other than an irritating rash, but he remained shallow and hormone-driven and so easily distracted that he derailed the plot
itself, and the dark sense of humor that started out fun soon felt annoying. Along the way, the tale devolved into a driving, walking, and downright
crawling tour of London. Not a street can be approached, not a corner turned, not a step taken without the author ensuring that I, the reader who was
evidently as infatuated with London as Peter is with most of the female cast (barring the few who aren't considered sexually attractive, who are - surely
by a strange coincidence, because it's the 21st century and thus authors have figured out that women have value beyond sex objects, right? - paper-thin
caricatures, often laughably so), was treated to paragraphs or pages detailing London architecture or history or some other thing that utterly failed to
arouse my interest on any level. If nothing else, surely the plot, with wizards and ghosts and vampires and a supernatural killer on the loose, ought to
engage me... but, again, that was an afterthought, jumbled in among Peter's rambling efforts to learn about wizardry and place it in a modern context,
start helping his master of marginal usefulness deal with the hidden monsters and spirits of London, and - in an entirely unrelated subplot that eats far
too much page count, largely to give Peter someone not entirely human to lust over when he's not secretly hoping to get into his colleague's pants (because
that's all women are for, even when they're clearly better investigators and should earn some manner of actual respect) - broker peace between the two
master spirits of the Thames, a Mother surrounded by buxom seductresses and a Father surrounded by pastoral Gypsy figures. Peter bungles and stumbles and
gets distracted by his own shadow, eventually groping his way toward the culprit and a resolution that feels flat, all of it playing clear second fiddle
to the main attraction: London, as presented in near-pornographic detail.
I'd stopped caring about anything and anyone in the book long before the last page was turned, and didn't bother reading the teaser for the second book.
Maybe I'm just too American (and too female) to get the appeal of this popular series, or understand why the mere fact that it was set in London was
apparently supposed to be enough to keep me reading, which is why it sank below a merely bland three star rating to a distinctly irked two.