It’s a demonstration of how very much I liked the first book in this series, Rivers of London (see my review) that I immediately jumped into the second – something I rarely do. Blessedly, it’s just as good as Rivers: full of rich detail and wit. (Yes, Peter does do something fairly stupid in Soho…but what young man doesn’t make stupid decisions when hot women are involved? I forgive him, considering he’s pretty smart otherwise.)
The general public have a warped view of the speed at which an investigation proceeds. They like to imagine tense conversations going on behind the venetian blinds and unshaven, but ruggedly handsome, detectives working themselves with single-minded devotion into the bottle and marital breakdown. The truth is that at the end of the day, unless you’ve generated some sort of urgent lead, you go home and get on with the important things in life – like drinking and sleeping, and, if you’re lucky, a relationship with the gender and sexual orientation of your choice. And I would have been doing at least one of those things the next morning if I hadn’t also been the last bleeding apprentice wizard in England. Which meant I spent my spare time learning magic, studying dead languages, and reading books like Essays on the Metaphysical by John “never saw a polysyllabic word he didn’t like” Cartwright.
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