Over the past few months I’ve read all ten novels in the Rivers of London series, along with the short stories, novellas, and now the graphic novels. I don’t often binge a series straight through, but Ben Aaronovitch’s mashup of police procedural, urban fantasy, and dry British wit was addictive.
The characters are one of the series’ great strengths. They are distinct and engaging, and reflect the diversity of modern London. The narrator is Peter Grant, a young constable of African descent who unexpectedly finds himself apprenticed into the arcane branch of the Metropolitan Police that handles magical crimes (staff size: 1). I enjoyed his journey from wide-eyed rookie to one of the most capable practitioners of magic in the police force without ever losing his bemused and pragmatic tone.
His mentor, Thomas Nightingale, has a long and mostly undisclosed past. That narrative choice keeps him slightly at arm’s length; he never quite becomes as fully fleshed-out as the rest of the cast. But by shifting Nightingale more into the background over time, the story avoids the usual fate of powerful mentor characters. He doesn’t die dramatically to make space for the student (think Obi-Wan, Yoda, and countless others) to keep him from overshadowing Peter’s story.
Peter’s relationships evolve across the series in sometimes surprising ways. His dynamic with Leslie begins as a standard buddy cop and takes several left turns. And then there are the rivers themselves: the major and minor waterways of London, each with their own genii locorum, gods and goddesses of place. Peter winds up romantically involved with one of them.
Peter’s narration is laced with London dialect, police jargon, and expressions drawn from his Sierra Leonian heritage. Even outside of dialogue, Peter has a running fascination (his colleagues might say obsession) with architecture. He drops dry commentary on the varying styles of British building over the centuries, including some withering assessments of the seventies and eighties. These asides are often funny, occasionally impenetrable, and part of the book’s distinctive voice.
As an American reader, this provided atmosphere and location. As with most British novels, I guessed at the meaning as needed. But partway through the first novel I opened a ChatGPT tab, titled it “British translations,” and started pasting in passages where I suspected I was missing some layers. That got me more than just definitions. It provided context such as sociocultural backgrounds, nuances of class, history, traffic patterns, architectural references, and the distinctively British perspective on policing. You can certainly enjoy the books without that, but I got a deeper appreciation of the milleu by taking a few minutes to get some background.
As one example, Peter casually refers to his first car as his “Ford Asbo”. At first I thought it was some kind of British rebranding of one of the Ford models, until I learned that “ASBO” stands for Anti-Social Behaviour Order, a British legal designation for petty criminals and public nuisances. The car wasn’t just junky; it was the kind of vehicle you’d expect to find driven by a teenage hooligan. That one word tells you all about Peter’s self-image, his sense of humor, and his social circles, providing you know what it means.
See below for links to the series, if I’ve piqued your interest.
Our Books
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Periphage Blues
Chuck Boeheim
Smuggler Samuel Whitt has a past he doesn’t fully remember. When he crosses paths with Color of Air, an enigmatic shapestealer, he thinks he’s playing her. But she turns the tables, stealing his body, his memories, and his ship.
It’s identity theft on a breathtaking scale. Samuel should be dead. Instead, he’s a passenger in her mind, forced into an uneasy alliance to survive. And they’re being hunted. The Concordium’s black ops division will stop at nothing to weaponize Color of Air and erase anyone who gets in the way.
Plans unravel fast. From a seedy bar to mobsters, covert labs, and a collector who turns the living to stone for her amusement, they seek to uncover the conspiracy that brought them together. Samuel begins to realize his past isn’t just missing. It might never have been his to begin with.
For fans of Murderbot, The Expanse, and Timothy Zahn, Periphage Blues is a gripping sci-fi thriller with a noir edge, full of survival, identity, and a partnership neither one chose.
What We‘re Reading
Visit our archive of reviews and recommendations on the Books We Like page of our website. You‘ll find over one hundred recommendations in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Non Fiction.
Where possible, I’ve also included links to other retailers, including Bookshop.org, which is a non-profit that contributes a percentage of sales to independent bookstores near you. Bookshop.org now provides ebooks as well as physical books, so you can do all your shopping there.
Rivers of London (series)
Ben Aaronovitch
Probationary Constable Peter Grant is securing a murder scene in London (which involves standing out in the cold all night to keep the public out) when a ghost volunteers his eye-witness account of the murder. The fact the Peter takes down the account and methodically follows up brings him to the notice of Thomas Nightingale, chief of a very specialized unit of the Metropolitan Police — the one that investigates cases too strange for the regular force. Peter becomes the newest member of the unit in the last fifty years, doubling its size, and becomes a trainee wizard cop under Nightingales’s tutelage.
Peter’s first assignment is to investigate the strange murder that the ghost had recounted, which quickly spirals into an entire string of strange killings. But there’s also a budding royal war that Nightingale assigns him to mediate — between the king of the upper Thames and the queen of lower Thames, both genii locorum, deities of the river itself. Thomas discovers a talent for the work, with a bent for scientific quantification of magic that is sometimes at odds with the old school Nightingale.
The story is steeped in London lore as thick as a copper’s mug of tea, told by someone who’s grown up there, and walked the beat for the past two years. It shows you a side of London you may have never seen. It’s full of wry, cynical cracks at London culture, language, and architecture. It’s a whole lot of fun and I heartily recommend it. Proper odd bollocks, this—mad as a box of frogs, and all the better for it.
Buy on Amazon Bookshop.org
Written on the Dark
Guy Gavriel Kay
In Written on the Dark, Thierry Villar is a tavern poet whose poor choices land him in the middle of something far larger than himself. Blackmailed into investigating the murder of a prominent duke who happens to be the brother of the King, he’s forced to take on a case even the city Provost would rather avoid. The political situation is already precarious: while the King is much loved, he’s periodically incapacitated by psychotic episodes, leaving the Queen and two rival regents to jockey for control. The murdered duke was a contender for that power.
Whatever his personal failings, Thierry has a quick mind and legal training, and soon finds himself digging into the crime more deeply than anyone expected—or wanted—him to.
Like most of Kay’s novels, Written on the Dark is set in a fantasy world—one with two moons in the sky and religions like the Jadites and Asharites, which bear little direct resemblance to Christianity or Judaism. Yet the setting is unmistakably an analog of 15th-century France. The reigning king suffers from bouts of madness, much like Charles VI in our world, and the political structure around him is similarly unstable. The climactic battle is a retelling of the Battle of Agincourt, though with a very different outcome, shaped by Thierry’s unlikely involvement.
Kay’s approach invites a dual reading. You can enjoy it purely as fantasy, or as a meditation on how things might have played out differently in our own history.
The book shares a world with A Brightness Long Ago and All the Seas of the World, but the stories are independent. You can start here without any prior knowledge. In fact, Written on the Dark is more focused and smaller in scope than some of Kay’s broader epics, which may make it a good entry point for new readers.
Buy on Amazon
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