Broken Homes
Ben Aaronovitch
357 pages
published in 2013
Peter Grant was a normal copper until he noticed he could talk to dead people in Rivers of London/Midnight Riot. Now he’s part of the Folly, the Metropolitian Police’s special unit for magic, which apart from him consists of one elderly but backwards aging survivor of the glory days of British wizardry before the war, as well as his colleague Lesley May, Toby the dog and Molly, the folly’s housekeeper of indefinitive species, currently experimenting with cooking from one of Jamie Oliver’s recipe books, to mixed results.
Broken Homes is the fourth novel in the Rivers of London series. There has been a mini boom in London based fantasy these past few years and Aaronovitch isn’t the only one either who has his protagonist working for the Met. There’s a sort of inevitability about the idea. London with its long history and dominant presence in the psyche of not just Britain, but arguably the world, just fits as a nexus of magic in a way that say Amsterdam wouldn’t. Of course the Met would have its own magical police force, some hangover from Victorian times, staffed with aging public schoolboys, into which the thoroughly modern London figure of police constable Peter Grant fits awkwardly. That tension between the gentlemanly tradition of magic and modern policing is part of the charm of the series.
The plot this latest installment is a bit messy. The first novel established the series background, which each successive novel has build up on, doing a tour of magical London, so to speak. In Moon over Soho a recurring menace was introduced, the Faceless Man, somebody who had found or inherited the magical abilities of an old time London gangster and who was ruthless in using it. In Broken Homes he returns, making this pretty much the middle volume of a fantasy series, oddly enough, with plot lines established but not quite resolved.
The establishing incident frex, that gets the whole plot rolling, is almost incidental to the rest of the book, up until the surprise at the very end. A traffic accident leads to a murder investigation which, because it involves one of the persons of interest on the Folly’s radar, gets Peter and Lesley involved. Their investigation also leads to a rare book offered for sale in a manner that suggested it had been stolen. That, in a roundabout way led on to the Skygarden, one of those modernist sixties monstrosities put up in the south of London back when tower blocks were still cool.
The Skygarden had been created by one Erik Stromberg, an expat German architect who had fled his home country after Hitler had risen to power in 1933. It soon turns out that Stromberg had some links to German magic circles and was interested in the industrialisation of magic. His Skygarden is not so much a machine for living, as a machine for gathering magic from everyday life…
There’s enough there for Peter and Lesley to go undercover as tenants, to see if they can find out whatever the Faceless Man’s interest in the Skygarden is. Complicating matters is the continued presence of the gods of the London rivers, also hanging around the estate. Things come to a head when the Faceless Man himself shows up and things end on a cliffhanger as something very surprising happens in the penultimate chapter. Something that came out of nowhere, without any setup, as surprising to the reader as it was to Peter.
Broken Homes was a quick, entertaining read, like the other installments in the Rivers of London series. Aaronovitch is a witty writer and while this isn’t really a demanding read, there’s an art to writing a good pop fiction story and Aaronovitch has mastered it.
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