Moon over Soho (… bring my love to me tonight …)

Moon Over Soho, Ben Aaronovitch

I have been noticing that book clubs are ironically counterproductive to my reading and so I’m electing to give them up – I’m currently in two, and I’ll be formally dropping out of at least one of them as part of an upcoming new year’s resolution, but honestly I’ve been sort of ghosting the soon-to-be-dropped club for a few months now. As a happy side effect, for the first time in a long time, I made time to actually read the second book in an on-going series.

In Moon Over Soho, the second in the Rivers Of London series, our intrepid Harry-Potteresque metropolitan Police Officer Peter Grant chases down another supernatural serial killer. In one lovely scene, continuing with his theme of blending rational scientific thinking with magical events, Aaronovitch has Officer Grant ruminating about the advances made by science for measuring different effects such as magnetic fields, radiation and distant stars in the context of complaining that nobody has come up with an objective way to measure vestigia, the residue left behind after magic has been performed. You know, because vestigia is the poor stepsister of the other forces of nature.

I also find Aaronovitch’s style of humour extremely entertaining. In describing what he calls London’s poor response to planning project, he writes:

That they eliminated the notorious Newport Market slums in the process, and thus reduced the number of unsightly poor people one might espy while perambulating about town, was I’m sure purely serendipitous.

Hahaha! Love it!

Reading book 2 did not disappoint. As it happens, I read several book 1’s from my “year of reading excessively” and in each case I decided to “save” the rest of the series for some unknown future date. I think that’s going to be my book challenge for 2019 – to finish the series that I’ve started.

Rating: Borrow it, unless you are a series collector, in which case this one would make a nice addition to your shelf.