Peter’s background is integral to the story – he has an understanding of certain London cultures that Nightingale lacks, so it’s an advantage to have Peter on the team. In Rivers of London, Peter, the main character, is London-born, with a mum from Sierra Leone and a white dad who’s a jazz musician (and junkie). This shouldn’t be at all remarkable, except I’ve just finished reading several contemporary novels in a row that were set in Sydney or London or New York and yet were exclusively peopled with white, middle-class, heterosexual characters (just like their respective authors, in fact). What I enjoyed most, though, were the characters, who are all interesting, funny and realistically multicultural. There’s plenty of blood, action and snarky commentary, and the two narrative strands are twisted together satisfactorily by the end of the book. In the first, a supernatural serial killer seems to be on the loose in London in the second, the gods and goddesses connected with the River Thames are squabbling over territory. Paperback cover of UK edition of ‘Rivers of London’ by Ben AaronovitchThe story involves two strands. And the vampires definitely aren’t sparkly.)
(Also, Nightingale travels in a 1960s Jag, rather than on a broomstick.
“I’m not a fictional character,” said Nightingale. It’s a very entertaining mix of police procedural and urban paranormal (complete with ghosts, vampires, demons, river nymphs and whatever bizarre, blood-sucking creature Molly the Maid is supposed to be), although Peter’s new wizard master, Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, wants to make it clear he’s not Harry Potter: I absolutely loved Rivers of London, the first in a series of novels about Constable Peter Grant of the London Metropolitan Police, who unexpectedly finds himself apprenticed to a wizard and solving gruesome supernatural crimes.
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