Occasionally this involves being physically or verbally abused, but mostly it involves paperwork.
I see a mixed reaction to this, the ninth of the Rivers of London series, but I rather enjoyed it. The title and the chapter headings are references to Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition sketch, and the plot background for the book includes the historical Spanish Inquisition. There is a mystery involving a strange magical being, and also Peter Grants infamous ex Leslie; there are seven rings that need to be found; there are plenty of cultural references; there is an excursion to Glossop, not far from where I was last month; and there is the imminent birth of Peter and Beverley’s twins. I found it very satisfactory and entertaining. You can get Amongst Our Weapons here.
His ID badge gave his name as Stephen Higgins, in black on a pink background, and his department as Magrathea – models, maquettes and concept art. He turned smoothly, shifting his balance and letting his hands fall to his sides in a deceptively relaxed manner. I remembered how fast he’d been back at the London Library and matched his pose.
As with Feet of Clay, I had been wondering if I would continue my project of reading through the Rivers of London books, though I was more inclined to keep going in this case as I have only two more to go after this. And as with Feet of Clay, reading False Value reassured me that I should follow through and finish the series. Here we have Peter Grant, cohabiting with Beverly, a very pregnant river goddess, and going undercover to investigate a software company which appears to be concealing occult secrets from the age of Babbage and Lovelace. I think I like these books more when they take the narrator away from standard Met occult policing into new territory, and this surely did while at the same time remaining firmly rooted in London. The Douglas Adams theme of the software company is excruciatingly awful and also all too believable. All good stuff. You can get False Value here.
Next (and so far, second last) on this list is Amongst Our Weapons.
‘We didn’t find a phone,’ I said, although it was true I hadn’t thought of that.
Tremendously executed climax to the arc of stories about occult London police detective Peter Grant, and his adversary the Faceless Man, with loving detail to the history and geography of London and the river spirits who sometimes ally with us mortals. The frustrations of working in the fictional bureaucracy of the magical side of the Met is also well imagined. I wasn’t so wowed by the previous book in the sequence but definitely enjoyed this. Two more to go (at least, two more that I have left over from a previous Hugo packet). You can get it here.
‘There’s some evidence that Christina Chorley might have been a practitioner,’ I said and explained Dr Walid and Vaughan’s fibrings, which led to Stephanopoulos asking the same questions I had. So I shared the same lack of answers that Dr Walid and Vaughan had given me – this is known in the police as intelligence focusing. First you identify what you don’t know. The next step is to go and find some likely sod and question them until they give you some answers. In the old days we weren’t that bothered whether the answers had anything to do with the facts, but these days we’re much more picky.
Sixth in the Rivers of London sequence, which I have generally enjoyed a lot. The drug-related death of a teenager turns out to involve the daughter of the goddess of the river Tyburn (the river which waters the roots of the original Hanging Tree) and Peter Grant and colleagues are brought in to sort things out. Also the Americans; also the Faceless Man, antagonist in a couple of earlier books. It ends with a grand magical shoot-out in a luxury apartment block. I quite enjoyed it, but got a bit of a middle-book vibe, as if the pieces are being put in place for something more to come. You can get it here.
I am a bit surprised to see that readers on both LibraryThing and Goodreads rate this higher than the previous book, Foxglove Summer; I’d have put them the other way round. Users of both systems agree in ranking the next in sequence, Lies Sleeping, top; so I have that to look forward to.
In the absence of coffee, I had a shower, and, by the time I was dressed, Dominic had texted me to say that he was on his way. The air was still fresh but the sun was already sucking up the moisture from the fields and you didn’t need to be chewing on a straw to know it was going to be another hot day.
I’ve read the previous installments of the Rivers of London series before and enjoyed them (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). In this volume, our protagonist, a London detective who has found himself sucked into magical investigations, is called to Herefordshire with his goddess girlfriend to investigate the disappearance of two girls. There’s lots of rural/urban tension, some glorious but not explicit erotic moments, and a look at how the boundary between our world and Faerie might manifest in the twenty-first century. There’s also a really good sense of place within Herefordshire’s geography. I think you could enjoy this book without having read the previous five books, but you’d enjoy it more if you had. You can get it here.
Not quite sure if this is a Bechdel pass. Plenty of women characters, who talk to each other a lot, but because the narrator is a man he is usually in the conversation too, or else being talked about. There’s a sequence at the top of page 117 where three goddesses are discussing mobile phone technology which possibly passes.
I realised a couple of weeks ago that I had paid for a couple of Humble Bundles of Doctor Who comics published by Titan over the years, and now had dozens of unread books to add to my Librarything catalogue. (Which is going to mean a big jump in the number of unread books that I log at the end of this month.) I’m going to go through them in order of internal chronology, hopefully at a rate of one a month, which will be enough for several years to go…
So that means starting with Operation Volcano, a collection of Seventh Doctor stories first published in 2018 as a three-shot series and then collected as a graphic novel. The majority of pages are taken up with the title story, by no less than Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovitch, which takes the Doctor and Ace to Australia for an adventure of alien infiltration with Group Captain Gilmore. It’s a well done, densely written adventure, which perhaps shows that the comics medium does not suffer the same limitations as the screen.
Second frame of third part of “Operation Volcano”:
There are also three shorter stories in the volume. “Hill of Beans”, by Richard Dinnick, takes the Psychic Circus from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy to a planet ruled by a president who looks just like Donald Trump. the art is by Jessica Martin who played Mags in the TV story and whose character features here. I’m afraid it did not really work for me.
“The Armageddon Gambit”, by John Freeman and Christopher Jones, is a less ambitious but more successful Doctor-and-Ace-outwit-the-aliens tale. Given that it is the third story in the book, I’ll give you its second frame as well.
(I think we know the answer to the alien commander’s questions)
Finally, an unexpected treat: a six-pager from Paul Cornell and John Stokes, “In-Between Times”, which explores the relationships between Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, the First Doctor and the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan. Rather lovely; and I suspect it may be the most recently published new First Doctor comic as of the time of writing.
You can get Operation Volcano here (if you didn’t get the Humble Bundle like I did). Next up is an Eighth Doctor volume, A Matter of Life and Death.
