This is part four of Ben Aaronovitch’s
magical journey with the Met Police, and it’s a good one.
There are strange things happening in
London, especially south of the river.
Why would a normal man, run a red light
and crash into another car? Why did that same man kill a woman and leave her
body in a shallow grave? Why would someone leave a tube station, only to walk
back down to the platform and jump in front of a train? And why was a very rare
and expensive, magical book, pawned at a bookshop of the Charring Cross road,
having been stolen from an ex-practitioner's house in leafy Hampstead?
With some diligence, a bit of luck and a
hell of a lot of help, Peter Grant and Lesley May manage to advance their
magic, whilst: trying to track down the faceless man, avoid being killed by a
homicidal Russian, Varvara Sidorovna, police the Spring Court for the God and
Goddess of the Thames, protect the monstrosity that is the grade two listed
tower at Skygarden, (an ugly concrete sky scrapper built by an eminent
architect who designed the building to harness large quantities of magic),
and walk the dog.
Sky, the wood nymph, dies when her trees
are attacked. Abigail is taken on as an ad hoc apprentice. Molly works her way
through one of Jamie Oliver’s cook books. The book thief is discovered at his
house, cooked from the inside! Nightingale rescues Peter and Lesley from
certain death and the Skygarden tower blow up with Peter standing on the roof.
Quite a lot happens then, and all wrapped
up in a little over three hundred and fifty pages.
Well, this book is worth reading for the
farm scene alone; it is one of the best scenes so far in this entire series.
Nightingale steams into an already tense situation, where Peter and Lesley have
been overpowered, and are about to die a very uncomfortable death at the
hands of the not so friendly Varvara, but with much magic and trickery,
Nightingale manages to wreck the barn, destroy a bungalow, capture the
villains, and . . .
No, I’m not going to spoil it for you. I’m
not even going to tell you why Lesley shots Peter in the back at the end. I’ll
just let you read it for yourselves.
Four and half well deserved stars for this
one then. On to book five: Foxglove Summer.
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