Peter Grant is back and he, Leslie and Nightingale are
faced with the ongoing dilemma of wizards with dubious ethics wandering around
London doing very very unpleasant things. It’s be useful to be able to focus on
them – but, of course, other things arise.
Including a murder – a murder which Stephanopoulos and
Seawall, doughty members of the murder squad that they are, believe involves
funny magic stuff. Not that they ever use the m-word, nor do they expect it to
be used around them; they just know it makes their lives much much more
complicated. And to make matters worse and even more complicated, the victim is
an American, and the son of a state senator at that.
It’s a case that takes them into the warrens of London’s
underground –it’s sewers and it’s railways and it’s many many many many tunnels
that go on for miles and have been centuries in the building. It’s a maze down
there – and it’s beyond amazing what can actually hide down there, unseen, for
so very long as they try to find the cause of the man’s death – and the many
surprises awaiting them underground.
It’s another review of fulsome praise, I have to say. In
some ways it’s easier to write a review with lots of dubious errors, pacing
issues or diversity fails because at least you have something concrete to say.
When a book is just awesome you’re presented with the difficulty of finding a
sufficient diversity of superlative adjectives to try and fill a full review.
The book has an incredible feel of place. You can feel
London in its pages, the attitudes, the people, the places, the procedures;
this is London through and through. The
richness and authenticity of not just the places, but also the history really
shows through the book and makes everything so much more real. Despite the
fantastic elements, it feels more fact than fiction because there is so much
realness there. And not just in the places and not even just in the people, but
also in the police procedures, the different jurisdictions, the way different
things are handled, the way they were handled – and not just the way they’re
officially handled, but also the daily practicalities of daily life.
The book is also funny with constant little
side-references, tangents and wry observations about life, the city and
everything linked with a cynical acknowledgement of how things are with an amusing
twits that makes me repeatedly smile and laugh out loud. I’m not sure how much
of it travels outside of a British context and British understanding, but to me
it was perfect – amusing, injected lightness and fun and added yet further to
the strong British feel of the book.
