False Value - Ben Aaronovitch

False Value is the latest in the long running P.C. Peter Grant series by Ben Aaronovitch, in which a young London policeman discovers he can do magic, investigates mystical crimes, finds love, and does a truly horrific amount of paperwork. I’ve been a fan of the series for years, so I went in expecting quite a lot from False Value – and it absolutely stepped up and delivered. 

One of the strong points of the series has always been the worldbuilding. It suggests a London which lives alongside the one we’re familiar with. One where vampires lurk in suburban basements, and where mystical pacts drive the tunnels of Crossrail. And this works, because both sides of the liminal divide are treated with equal attention, and equal respect. The pageants of the old gods of the river have all the colour, verve and life that sits at the heart of these celebrations even now. And the fluorescent flickers of the Silicon Roundabout, with its buzzwords and ruthlessness disguised as corporate beneficence is appallingly familiar. It’s also no less strange than a policeman who can fling fire from his fingertips, though perhaps a little more mundane.  

For me it’s the blend that makes this world work. The way that the normal and the supernatural mix, the way they interweave, until the idea that the tech wizards over the river might have something in common with actual wizards seems worryingly plausible. Also, even as these worlds are being woven together by an expert hand, we get to see London. Living, breathing, occasionally kicking the crap out of someone, occasionally letting that sparkle at the bottom of a sewer grate be your wedding ring after all. Aaronovitch loves London, and it shows in the prose, whose descriptions balance sharp observation with wry affection. By the end of this story, I defy you not to love London too, or at least, understand it a little better.  

So yes. We’re back in London. And yes, London is as fierce and driven and dark and beautiful as it ever was, laced with history, with romance and death, with people getting by, people getting rich, and people fighting to survive. You can feel that on the page.  

Which brings us to Peter. In a lot of ways, we’ve watched Peter Grant grow up over the series. The man on these pages is perhaps a little more emotionally honest with himself than he had been. Carries a few more scars, physical and mental. This Peter Grant can still be surprised, which is a delight for him and us (well, except when he’s surprised by some new and exciting way to get himself killed, which is less good for him), but has the experience to be cautious. Watching Peter mature has been a joy, and he’s a good man here, I think. Someone who can be a friend, a partner, a mentor. Possibly not always doing the correct thing, but by his light, trying to eventually do the right one.  

As a character study, it’s a joy to read. Peter’s internal voice is wry, cynical, observant and self aware. It’s a pleasure to be along for the ride with him, and that voice is what keeps you turning pages, trying to see what Peter is seeing, trying to work the corners of a mystery, trying to understand what’s coming next. And what’s next for him too, actually.  Peter is comfortable in himself, I think, but trying to understand what’s next – and at the same time is warm and loving to his family, a smartarse, and a top-notch investigator.  

There’s a wider cast, of course. Many are familiar faces to long time readers. Some are new. All of them have something. Each of them is memorable, from the odd denizens of London’s tech sector, to the at-least-as-odd denizens of its supernatural courts. They’re real. Police working on cases with minimal budgets and support, trying to do the best they can and keep the peace. Private security, balancing the needs of their bosses and a steady income with what they’re willing to do in service of either. Rivers who want to have fun – or not. And other things, stranger, darker things, they live here too. And if all of the people feel real, if we empathise with them, if we feel their sadness and their passion and their amity and their rage and their love for one another, we also feel the darkness, sitting just out of view, and it is no less intimate, no less real than the people who live with it, around it, or investigate it. It all works, this story of people, and works wonderfully.  

So the world is brilliantly realised, the characters live and breathe. But is the story any good, though? 

Well, in a word, yes. I do think it works better if you’ve read the previous books in the series. It would work as a standalone, but there’s context here, relationships built up, personal accretions constructed over the course of years of fiction, which you’d miss out on without the previous books. I probably missed more from not having read the comics. But yes, the story, it works. As a standalone, yes. As part of a wider series, of a wider universe – very much so.  

I don’t want to give story spoilers here. But this one is a lot of fun. There’s some lovely personal interludes for Peter, working on his relationships. There’s some top-notch scheming. The investigative work is meticulous, the action sequences tense, the dialogue witty, the banter abundant. If Peter’s always half a step ahead in cracking the case, we’re always there with him, seeing what he sees, and trying to work out what’s going on. In finest mystery tradition, the clues are all there for us to work on. And this one is a pretty fine mystery, too. There’s heart-in-mouth moments, and the pindrop silences of quiet terror. There’s backchat between friends, and explosions. There’s action sequences that had me speeding through the pages, and emotional moments that had me savouring every word. 

Basically, this is another fine entry in the series. You’ll want to pick it up, and once you do, you won’t be able to put it down.  

Upright Women Wanted - Sarah Gailey

Upright Women Wanted is a thoughtful, provocative work. Sometimes poignant, often wryly, grimly funny, and always incisive, cutting at the heart of the way we see ourselves, the way society shapes us, and the capacity of people to re-imagine themselves. It really is all those things. And they help make it a great book. What also makes it a great book, is it being a dystopian western, where gender-queer spies and six-shooter-toting revolutionaries trickle around the edges of a nation at war. It’s a story which isn’t afraid to grab your attention by kicking arse, and uses the moments when you’re looking to draw breath as an opportunity to ask the bigger questions.  

What I’m saying is, this one was a lot of fun to read.  

In a sense, the world is a familiar one. You can see the badlands, the cracked gravel trails that a horse-drawn covered wagon crunches down. The sweeping vista of the big sky. We know the big hats, the sheriff’s stars. The lonely, intimate majesty of a campfire shared with travelling companions new and old, airing old wounds and showing older scars. And at the same time, there’s something else. There are sweat-shop factories turning out microcircuitry for drones. There’s diesel fuel going to military convoys rumbling toward a seemingly endless war. There’s fatigue, and a sort of quietly poisonous patriotism. There’s hyper-masculinity, a sense of old horrors brought back out into the night, of women (and every other oppressed group) being dragged back into their  ancient chains, in a society which is unable and unwilling to understand the convulsions that wrack it within and without.  

It’s a world where you can feel the dust in the back of your throat, and see the hugely waving national flags under the scorching sun. Where you can taste fear, and trace the oily scent of power back to men with money, and men with guns.  

Esther is our window into this world. A stowaway. A young woman who wants to get as far away from her town as she can. A young woman who is no longer sure who she is, or what she wants to be. A young woman living in the heart of a trauma, used to the ways of a world which demands much from her, a world which is willing to make sure she conforms to it. But Esther is more than the will of a totalitarian state acting on her. She is her self. And even as the story opens, we can see that Esther has grit, has will, has the fire and energy to become something else. To live a story that isn’t the one expected.  

I have a lot of time for Esther, who doesn’t know much about the world at large, but knows how to cook. Who isn’t sure whether stories she’s heard are true or not, but is willing to learn. Who doesn’t know much about travelling backroads, or sedition, or revolution, but knows a good person, and tries hard to be one. Esther is a heroine whose discomfort, whose discoveries, we feel alongside her. We can see her struggle, see her rise up in the face of adversity, and cheer her on.  

In this she’s aided by a delightful cast of cheerful reprobates. They’re by turns hopeful, furious, conflicted, loving – and all the other complexities of the human experience. Gailey can write characters. They come to life before our eyes, with their own quiet stories, with their own hurts, their own needs, their own fierce passions and quiet tragedies. These are people; as they flow into Esther’s life, as they build something for her, with her, and as the wagon keeps rumbling down the trail, we see them as living, breathing souls, who just happen to be in a book. The prose that gets us there is concise yet rich, with a certain poetry living in the quiet spaces between the words.  

Which isn’t to say it isn’t also a bloody good story.  

I’m always saying this, but, no spoilers here. The broad strokes are there: fleeing into the night. Sudden betrayal. Gunfights. Romance that carries a white hot heat, and also the gentle affection and compassion that makes the heat bearable. More gunfights. Self realisation. Revelation. Hard riding in a good cause. People being rather sarcastic, and very funny. A fight for truth, for justice, for something better. It’ll grab hold of you and not let go until it’s done, this story. It’s bloody wonderful. If you want to try something new, something a bit special, this is the story for you.  

The Shadow Saint - Gareth Hanrahan

So. The Shadow Saint. It’s good. Like, really, really good. It’s the sequel to Gareth Hanrahan’s The Gutter Prayer, which I also thought was, er, really, really good. Before digging into it a little more, I may be able to save you some time by saying that if you read and enjoyed The Gutter Prayer, you’ll be wanting to pick up the sequel. You won’t be disappointed.  

There’s a lot going on this time, as the text examines big issues – religion, politics, identity – through a personal and fantastic lens. It does this with some top-notch characterisation, and by extending the vividly detailed worldbuilding of the previous instalment. 

There are three central characters to the story: Eladora, Terevant, and The Spy. Eladora was a member of the supporting cast in the previous book, and it’s great to see her get room to grow here. She’s clever, razor-sharp, a little ambitious, and trying to do the right thing. A the story begins, she’s finding a vocation as a political operative, trying to shape the direction of the city of Guerdon, recently reshaped by magical fiat. There’s a fair amount of politics in this story, centred around an upcoming election. Eladora is the pivot, a woman trying to speak to and for the dispossessed, the disenfranchised, and those otherwise unable to have a voice of their own. Eladora is fierce. Flawed, yes. Mistaken, from time to time. But driven to succeed, and putting the best interests of people and city before her own personal needs. I might not describe her as a woman of action, but a compelling, convincing heroine nonetheless.  

While Eladora is out causing trouble in the city, we also spend some time with Terevant. He’s the scion of a noble family, from a country where the dead have a tendency to hang around after their demise and offer advice and post-generational disappointment in equal measure. More of the latter for Terevant, if I’m honest. The juniour scion of a great family, and survivor of a supernatural war, he’s not really up to much when the story begins. That said, he is both a pitch-perfect portrayal of a younger son, and a great point of view into both Guerdon (as an outsider) and into a contracting empire where the dead-but-walking-around outnumber the living. I won’t dig into his role too much, or fear of spoilers – but Terevant is keenly observed and compellingly written. I’d say his narrative strand is melancholy, investigative and intriguing – as he starts digging around in the dark corners of Guerdon society, neither he or we know what he’ll find. Though it might be explosive once dug up. 

And then there’s The Spy. Too much spoiler potential here. But The Spy puts on faces like the rest of us wear shoes. They switch personalities, they drift in and out of view. They’re never quite who you expect. And each time The Spy is someone knew, their writing changes; they become, to us as well as themselves, the person they portray. I found the multiple perspectives with an underlying agenda to be a frightfully clever piece of writing, and was gripped by the dilemma’s and struggles of The Spy’s various personae, even while trying to work out what it was they were up to.  

All three are strutting their stuff against the backdrop of Guerdon, the city rebuilt at the close of The Gutter Prayer. This is a new world. But it’s as multi-faceted and lovingly described as it was before. Each twisted alleyway. Each marble tower populated by squatters. Each ship of refugees crossing the thrashing waters to enter a neutral port in a world wracked by conflict. They all feel real. This is a world which lives and breathes, and invites you to inhabit it. Of course, there is a war on. And that is as lovingly, horrifyingly, lavishly described as the city which serves as a shelter from it. This is a war of mad gods, an epic struggle that seems likely to end only in annihilation, where worshippers are less than chaff between the toes of the gods, and the gods are less divine than they are broken, screaming monstrosities. The war will stop your heart, and Guerdon, an oasis of sanity in a world obviously insane, will take you into its own.  

The story I won’t get into, for fear of spoilers. That said, it’s good stuff. There are crosses, double crosses, betrayals and unmaskings aplenty. There’s some truly epic magic, if that’s your thing – warring divinities don’t tend to play nice, and definitely get messy. In amongst this chaos there are beautiful moments of personal tenderness, hardship, heartbreak, friendship, and hope. There are people. There are emotional stakes which will wrench at your heart, and Big Damn Explosions which will threaten to displace that same heart into another country via your ribcage. There’s wry humour and a dash of romance. What there is most though, is a sense that all of these things matter, to the world and to the people we see within it. This is a story which will get its hooks into you. This is a story which won’t let go. This is a story you’ll find yourself staying up until 4am to finish. This is a story you’ll want to read.

So why wait? Go on, get reading.