Aaronovitch, Ben -- Midnight Riot [e-book purchase]

This is the other end of the spectrum from the Midnight Mayor series: London urban fantasy, with all its modern multicultural juice, but built on London cop bureaucracy with the fantasy layered on top. The protagonist meets magic and starts experimenting with cell-phone batteries, rather than (e.g.) taking a flying leap into a hallucinatory cloud of fantasy alterworld. It is well done as a police procedural, but I prefer the flying-leap Gaiman-or-Kate-Griffin style, so I was slow getting into this.

(Also, the real-life grounding made the horrific supernatural crimes a little too brutal for my taste. I guess it bothers me less when it's a thug with a sword doing it to fantasy palace guards. Now you know.)

All that said, the supernatural pace picks up slowly as the book goes along, until it's a giant chewy ball of spirit-journey bouncing cheerily downhill into the tenpins of sanity and sense. And the police procedural stuff is good, with clues and sneaky villains and everything. So I am with this series and will read the next one.


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