Wolfsbane by Patricia Briggs

Briggs explains in the beginning of this book that it's a trunk novel. She wrote it years ago and was unable to sell it because it was the wrong novel at the wrong time and, now that she's found success, she was able to pull it out and release it. I'm glad that she did.

Wolfsbane is a secondary world fantasy, and the sequel to a work called Masques, which I haven't read. It features Aralorn, a clever spy and mercenary, and her damaged wizard lover, Wolf. Aralorn receives word that her father has died and she returns to her homeland for the first time in ten years for his burial. She is the second-oldest in a large family, a bastard conceived before her father married. Nevertheless, she has a warm relationship with most of her family, including with her stepmother. Aralorn's mother was a shapeshifter, and she has some magical abilities in addition to being able to take the shape of a mouse, or a goose, or a cat. When she sees her father's corpse she quickly realizes that he isn't actually dead, but he is under a spell. This is cause for celebration among the family, but they need to figure out who set the spell, and how to lift it.

I was struck as I was reading Wolfsbane by a sense of familiarity. I know that I could not have read this book before, as it was only released in 2010, but it felt familiar, like something I've read before, a long time ago. It probably does resemble, at least parts of it, other stories I've read over the years. So it was a strange sensation, sort of tickling at the back of my mind, as I tried to remember the older works that were setting off bells of recognition as I read this.

That said, even though this novel felt comfortable and somewhat unchallenging, it is a very good read. I don't need to always read books that are trying to be edgier than what has come before. I read a whole lot of books like this when I was younger, and I still enjoy one every now and then. I liked Aralorn and Wolf's relationship, they felt like they went together believably. If I had any complaint to make -- and really, I don't particularly -- it's that the male characters greatly outnumber the women. There are women in the book, it's just that none of them except Aralorn get much of a speaking role. There's her stepmother, who is good and strong but we don't see that much of her; there are two of her sisters, one beautiful and good-natured but who hardly gets more than three lines in the novel, and the other an annoying brat who really only shows up in one conversation. And there is her uncle's bitchy wife, who is mentioned several times but only seen once. Oh, yes, and the priestess, who actually does have a fairly important if small role. Otherwise it's Aralorn and various men working their way through the problems. And that's reallly a shame, because there are interesting women in the book, we just don't get to spend any time with them.

Wolfsbane is clearly a sequel, and the story revolves heavily around the events of the previous book. Obviously, it can be read on its own, as I did. But I feel that I was missing some backstory, particularly about Aralorn and Wolf's relationship, and I was a little foggy on the timetable of events. I don't know if I will ever track down Masques, both because I don't read a lot of secondary world fantasy and because it was Briggs's first published novel and I'm guessing it is a bit rough. But Wolfsbane was certainly well worth the time, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it.

After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn

A couple of years ago, when I dug deeply into the urban fantasy genre to see if it really wasn't for me, or if I just hadn't found the good stuff, one of the books I read was Kitty and the Midnight Hour by Carrie Vaughn. I really disliked it, and have avoided the author ever since. However today I was at Barnes & Noble and, after sampling, decided to try this one. It isn't part of the Kitty Norville series, and I seem to recall that it has generally been well-reviewed online.

After the Golden Age is about superheroes. Our protagonist, Celia West, is the daughter of the city's top two heroes, Olympus and Spark. She, herself, does not have any superpowers, which means that she hasn't followed in their footsteps. She has not, however, been able to step out from under their shadow. The novel begins with her being abducted, yet again, by villains who want to use her as a bargaining chip with her parents and the city government. This has happened quite a few times before, and makes her mad at her parents all over again.

Her anger and resentment toward her parents is the overriding theme throughout the book. She feels very sorry for herself and upset with her parents, and I get the feeling she's never grown out of being a teenager, though she claims she has. Add to that her teenaged rebellion by joining forces with a villain who wanted to destroy the city, and there was nothing at all about Celia to like or respect. Nothing at all. And man, what an immature, self-pitying whiner.

Which isn't to say that she has an easy time of it -- Vaughn uses the sort of plotting I hate in which every single character (with the exception of the guy she falls in love with) reacts to everything in the worst possible way. That sort of piling on is not really believable, and never a good sign. Nor is her father a very sympathetic character, but heck, he really isn't a character at all, just a two-dimensional stereotype bellowing in rage all the time.

Oh, and can I talk about her job? She says she is a forensic accountant, an MBA and a CPA. She's 25 years old. That is just barely possible, and too-young protagonists are a particular peeve of mine. A degree in accounting takes at least 4 years. That would make her 22 when she graduated. An MBA usually takes 2 years. That would make her 24 when she got that degree, assuming she went straight on to grad school. To become a CPA, you need a four-year accounting degree, you need to pass the CPA exam, and you need a certain amount of qualifying work experience. It varies by state, but one year is common. She says she's been at her job for three years, which implies that either the math is wrong, or perhaps she did grad school at night in addition to her job. Not impossible, just improbable. On the other hand, the probability that an accountant as young and inexperienced as she would be working on an important case with the DA's office? Absolutely nil. I'm an accountant. I'm not a CPA, but I've worked with public accountants. You have to put in a lot of time and pay your dues before you work your way up to being the lead on something important, because experience is everything in accounting. You get your shiny new degree, but you still have a hell of a lot to learn, as every accountant knows who's worked in the field for very long. The likelihood that her boss would send her, and her alone, to work on this issue? It's simply impossible.

The story doesn't do anything very interesting with the source material, and the solution -- a greedy politician stirring up trouble between the city government and the supernaturals -- is so unoriginal it was insulting. The text slides along smoothly and engagingly, but the actual plot is just not actually very good. So, that's two trips to Barnes and Noble, this month, and two terrible books were the result. I might as well just buy all my books online in the future. And Vaughn is now on my Do Not Buy list. What a waste of time and money.

The Blue Place by Nicola Griffith

The Blue Place is a mystery/thriller featuring Aud Torvingen, a tall, scary violent lady who is a former police officer and now freelances when she feels like it. She is out late one night, walking, when she collides with a woman who is running. Moments later, a nearby house is in flames. The woman tracks down Aud, and hires her to look into the incident, as a friend of hers died in the blaze. At the same time, she agrees to act as escort/bodyguard for the daughter of a Spanish politician who is visiting Atlanta for a few days.

To a large extent, The Blue Place is character study of Aud. She thinks pretty constantly about danger, about bad things that could happen, and how she would go about killing people she encounters. Not that she intends to harm them, just as a mental exercise. She is constantly sizing up every scene, imagining the deaths of the people around her. She does martial arts, and teaches new police officers how to put people down and fight dirty if necessary, and eventually Griffith reveals why Aud is so focused on danger and violence. We watch as she seeks nature and rails in her head against development, and we observe as she develops a relationship with someone she becomes very attached to. We ponder the fact that she has dual citizenship, as her mother is Norwegian and her father American, and her odd childhood as the daughter of a workaholic diplomat which made her very self-sufficient.

The thing that really stuck with me about the book, however, is that it reminded me of Smilla's Sense of Snow, which I read eighteen years ago and don't even remember all that clearly. Like Smilla, Aud is an odd but compellingly unique outsider. Like Smilla, she she is Scandanavian, but does not live in the country where she grew up. Like Smilla, she is independently wealthy and doesn't have to work if she chooses not to. Like Smilla, she loves silk and fine possessions. Like Smilla, she turns into an action hero and leaves behind a trail of bodies without any accountability, including a scene on a glacier. Which isn't to say that the plot of this one resembles Smilla's all that much, just that as I read it I kept being reminded of Smilla.

Aud fairly quickly figures out why the man was killed, and she leaves the information in the hands of the police to clear up. But then she realizes that her love interest may be in danger, so they take a trip to Norway and all kinds of shit goes down. I have to say, I didn't particularly buy their relationship. We are told they love each other and are happy together, but it didn't really click for me. I felt more chemistry between Aud and a one-night stand she has earlier in the book than I did with the person she decides she loves. I think this may be partly because the story jumps forward in time a couple of times, so we are don't really get to see for ourselves how things are developing. On the other hand, I never really believed in the woman (the love interest, I mean, not Aud) as a character, so perhaps it's not surprising that I never bought into their relationship. She never felt real to me, so when she was in danger it didn't cause me the slightest worry, and since Aud is portrayed as unnaturally good at violence, I never really worried about her safety, either. It was clear that she was going to be able to handle whatever came up.

I had one other slight problem with the novel, and that is that it was easy to get sidetracked. Aud would be headed somewhere and on the way she'd think about all sorts of other things, and by the time she arrived at her destination I'd forgotten where we were going, and why. Perhaps people not muzzy-headed from spring allergies might have no trouble navigating this narrative style, but I kept following Aud down these musings off the main trail and then finding myself a bit disoriented when we reappeared on the main path.

I do not mean to imply, however, that I didn't enjoy the book. I did, in fact. It has an interesting protagonist and plenty of stuff happening, and it just sucks you right along. This is the kind of book to read in one sitting on a Saturday, which is exactly what I did. It's a very compelling and entertaining read. I figured out who the second villain was before it was revealed, and certain things seemed a bit predictable, and the ending came straight out of the 1970s. It was a still a good read, though. Recommended.

Black Magic Woman by Justin Gustainis

I tracked this one down because last summer I read Hard Spell by this author and liked it fairly well. This is an earlier work, another magical crime-solving novel. I have a complicated relationship with this genre--I like mysteries, and I often like fantasy. If done well (like Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch) it can be a great read. Unfortunately most attempts at this sort of story don't work for me as well as Aaronovitch's work. In fact, it often leaves me disappointed and annoyed. Still, I am ever hopeful, and keep trying new ones, looking for the good stuff.

Black Magic Woman has three heroes: a consulting supernatural problem-solver named Quincey Morris, a white witch named Libby Chastain, and a South African detective sergeant named Van Dreenan who is consulting with the FBI on some ritualistic child murders. I liked Van Dreenan well enough, and found the other two inoffensive but perhaps a bit bland. There are two crimes going on that are related: Van Dreenan is working on the child murders, as I mentioned earlier, and Morris and Chastain are trying to help a family out from under a curse, and must locate the witch who is trying to kill them. Along the way they have adventures as the witch is tracking them and trying to kill them, as well.

It took me a while to get through this book, which is never a good sign. When I'm really interested and engaged, I fly through books. I gulp them down, and neglect other things I ought to be doing so that I can spend more time reading. If I'm not that engaged, on the other hand, I spend my free time doing other things, or reading other things. That's what happened with this one. I picked at it for a week and half, reading it on my lunch breaks and a bit over the weekend. In the meantime I did many other things, including reading a couple of other books before I got around to finishing this one.

It's hard to put my finger on exactly why this one didn't engage me, but it didn't. Additionally, the author seemed to be trying too hard. For instance, near the beginning there is a scene in which he tries to fill in backstory by having Morris pull out and re-read a letter about his great-grandfather, who was a character in Dracula. We have six pages of info-dump about his ancestor, recounting things that happened in Dracula. Instead of making me think, "Wow, how cool!" I was rolling my eyes and skipping forward. I would greatly have preferred it if Gustainis hadn't tried to connect his work with Stoker's. It's sort of tacky and made me lose interest. There are other instances of too much infodump or storytelling by flashback. I am more critical of this method of exposition than most people, but really -- it was mostly overkill, and made the story grind to a halt while we waited for the unnecessary flashback to be over.

And then I got to wondering about how Libby Chastain was portrayed. This is probably unfair to Gustainis, but lately I've been thinking a lot about how women are treated, or ignored, in fiction, so it was on my mind. Chastain is a white witch, and probably better able to face down the black witch than Morris. As we approach the end of the novel, one of the attacks on them is partially successful, and Chastain is severely, life-threateningly wounded, and so Morris has to leave her in her hospital bed and go have the showdown with the witch on his own. And I that makes me wonder--is it because the story may be more interesting if the less-qualified character is the one to face the villain? Or is it because Morris is the real hero of the book, so he has to be the one to do it, and therefore Chastain is expendable? The thing is, I've been thinking about refrigerator women lately. And I can't help but observe that the woman is the one who is the poor (mostly) helpless victim left behind while the man is the one who goes off and has a story about him having adventures. And if this were an isolated incident it wouldn't matter, but this sort of thing, with the women being the victims and the men the heroes, is so deeply ingrained in our culture of storytelling, that I think even the writers themselves aren't really thinking about why they put stories together that way so often. They just do it. I'm not pointing an accusatory finger at the author, in fact it is depressing to me that I have to keep having this train of thought and questioning why a story was written a particular way. But if it weren't so common, I wouldn't have to keep having that train of thought.

On the other hand, I might not have had to question the motivation for why a plot was constructed a particular way if it had been a better book. Black Magic Woman isn't bad, exactly, it's just a bit dull, the characters a bit boring, and the writing felt a bit too inexperienced. I know that Gustainis got better, as I thought Hard Magic was a better book than this one. But I probably shouldn't have wasted my time trudging through to the end of this one, as it just wasn't that interesting.

Live to Tell by Lisa Gardner

Live to Tell is a novel of suspense. It's a crossbreed between a police procedural and a psychological thriller. It's the sort of book I would be very, very unlikely to pick up on my own, but this was the March selection for my book group, so I gave it a try.

There are three point of view characters. One is a beautiful, successful female police sergeant who can eat vast quantities of food without ever gaining a pound, and is horny and trying to decide who to have sex with. I wanted to dislike her on general principles, because she seems a little too good to be true. However, she was the only one of the three point of view characters I could stand. Another is a woman with a scary, violent child who wants to kill her, but she refuses to seek professional care for him. The third is a children's psych ward nurse whose family all died when she was a child, leaving her the sole survivor, and she's really, really fucked up.

We follow the police sergeant to a couple of crime scenes. In each case a whole family was wiped out, apparently by the father, who then committed suicide. But in each case that turns out not to be the case. It appears that an outside party killed them all and staged it to look like a murder-suicide. They find a tenuous connection between the families: both had a troubled child who had spent time in the psych ward where our neurotic psych nurse worked. The police go there to learn more about the dead children, and when another child dies in the hospital, they turn their attention to the staff of the psych ward, and particularly our neurotic nurse, who is barely holding it together because the anniversary of her family's death is approaching.

I won't go into too much detail about the plot beyond that, but it all turned out to be related to the incident with her family all those years before, and she had to have an epiphany about what happened that night in order to save herself from the killer. Generally speaking, I hate novels where the key to the current crime is uncovering the facts about something that happened years ago. Our book group has read several stories with that premise. It seems to be a pretty common motif in the mystery writer's tool box.

As you may have inferred from my description of the book, this is not something I would have ever chosen on my own to read, and that I am not the target audience for this book. Despite that, I found it a pretty good book. I was pleased to find that the writing is really absorbing, sucking the reader right in, and that the story moves along briskly. After a while I started skipping the sections with the mother who was afraid of her child, but otherwise I did not feel that reading this book was a trudge or too much of a chore. It has gotten to be a running joke in my book group that I don't bother to finish the book if I didn't like it, but this one I finished. Some of them (can anyone say Scandinavian mysteries?) I can't even force myself to read past the first couple of chapters. Live to Tell, on the other hand, I flew through quite easily. It was an entertaining book despite unlikeable characters, a tedious story type, and a killer who was a madman. So I guess I can only say, if this is the type of story you enjoy, it's a particularly good example of it.

Divergence by Tony Ballantyne

This is another book from the paper To Be Read pile that I'm trying to work my way through. This is apparently the third novel in a set. I read the first, Recursion, long enough ago that I don't remember much about it. I haven't read the second novel.

We begin Divergence on the trading ship Eva Rye, where the crew are having an argument.  They are new to trading, and are trying to decide whether to deal with a robot that wants help, or if it's a trap and will end badly.  Eventually they decide to make the deal, using a program they have called Fair Exchange.  In theory, if they trade, the program will determine their needs and will come up with terms that are beneficial to both parties.  They agree to the trade, and the result is not at all what they expected and seems to be a disaster.

Nevertheless, this shakes things up, and we follow the Eva Rye as it continues to travel and make trades.  They acquire a passenger, Judy, who needs to get to Earth.  This is considered a dangerous voyage, as Earth is under quarantine due to the presence of dark seeds that seem to feed on intelligent thought.  They eat humans and AIs alike, and if fed they grow and kill and destroy.  This is a hazard throughout space, but it is particularly bad around Earth. Nevertheless, they agree to take her there.

Judy tells them that she doesn't want to return to Earth, but fate, or the AIs, seem to be arranging things to force her back there.  She hasn't got a choice, and the crew of the Eva Rye don't, either, now that they've associated with her.  They receive an unusual number of requests to trade, and find themselves acquiring an odd assortment of cargo which mostly proves to be useful along the way. 

This is a science fiction novel, with spaceships and AIs and all sorts of adventures, but its structure is basically that of a quest fantasy.  We have a small band of travelers who are taking the Chosen One (Judy) for a showdown with the Overlord (an AI known as The Watcher, which runs Earth).  Along the way they have adventures and meet people who help them or try to stop them, and there are attacks by Dark Forces (the destructive and mysterious seeds).  However all along there is the powerful and magical hand of Fate, or Magic (the Fair Exchange program) that is pushing them along and ensuring that they reach their destination. 

Judy is meanwhile having mystical visions, or at least dreams, about a woman named Eva Rye (after whom their ship was not coincidentally named) who, through her experiences, is supposed to bring Judy to have an epiphany about the nature of the problem facing her.  These were really, really, REALLY tedious,and the great Aha! moment never really happened.

I really enjoyed the first 250 pages or so of this novel. After that, as we're getting closer to the big showdown with the Overlord and we're discovering just why Judy is so special, got a lot less enjoyable. The insight about the nature of the problem wasn't particularly believable to me, but then neither were the amazing, magical powers of the Fair Exchange program. Also, Ballantyne succeeded in creating real, fallible characters to the extent that not only are they fallible, most of them are also really unlikeable and annoying. And yet, despite these problems, I enjoyed the book anyway. It's entertaining and kept my attention and I wanted to know what happened next.

Dancing with Bears by Michael Swanwick

Like Who Fears Death, Dancing with Bears was part of an armload of books I bought in the Borders liquidation, and brought home and then wondered why I'd bought it.  Unlike Who Fears Death, Dancing with Bears was good.

It is set in a a future after the Utopia (our time, with machines and the internet and stuff) was destroyed, after the electronic machines turned on humanity.  They were defeated, mostly, but still reside in a few places and underground, hating humanity and plotting its downfall.  This world, then, is in some ways more primitive, but in other ways has advanced science, seemingly mostly in the use of genetics and cloning.

In fact, one of our protagonists, Surplus, is a dog.  He walks on two feet and speaks and acts like a human, but his genetic material is canine, and he is furry and has paws and a snout.  It is mentioned surprisingly little, so that one can easily forget that he is anything other than a normal human.  His accomplice is Darger, who has the gift of a remarkably ordinary appearance that's hard to remember.  Together, they are con men, and are traveling to Muscovy to try to separate the Duke from a sizable amount of money.

In order to get there, they have signed on with a diplomatic mission from Byzantium, accompanying an ambassador and his gift of seven genetically-engineered beautiful, horny virgins.  The ambassador dies along the way, and Surplus steps into his role as ambassador. They travel, along with the seven beautiful virgins and a number of large, strong genetically-engineered guards, plus a religious fanatic and a stupid young man, to Muscovy, and begin their plan of extorting money from the Duke.  Unfortunately for them, they have arrived in interesting times.  Treachery and revolution are afoot, and they have to shift their plans on the fly to try to remain alive and escape the city with a nice profit.

It takes a while for all of this to develop, and there are plenty of interesting characters and funny moments.  There is unfortunately rather a spoiler in the cover art of the book, but it doesn't matter too much because they journey is still lots of fun.  Nevertheless, I figured out how the revolution was going to be quashed before it had even begun, due to the cover illustration.  There is a good deal of fraud taking place in the book, and spies, and sex and drugs, and horrible things happening to characters we're not attached to.  Most of the time I didn't know what was going to happen next, and I enjoyed the surprise of discovery as I went along.  I enjoyed this one more than other Swanwick books I've read.  It's just wonderfully entertaining and a good read.  Recommended.

License to Ensorcell by Katharine Kerr

On Sunday I found myself in the vicinity of Barnes & Noble and decided to go in and see if I could find anything interesting.  I didn't, so instead I bought this book.  I've read a couple of Kerr's novels in the past and liked them okay, so I was willing to give this one a shot even though it seemed kind of flat and dull when I tried a sample in the store.  That was a mistake on my part.

License to Ensorcell is sort of an urban fantasy novel.  It features Nola O'Grady, magic girl, who has a sort of vague job doing nothing much for a super secret government agency that apparently doesn't pay well.  She has moved back to her home town of San Francisco because of reports of Chaos in the area.  She has a cover story of working at a small office in an old building, but in reality she apparently is supposed to wander the streets aimlessly to see if she spots any Chaos, and then report back.  This seems a bit odd to hand to a sorceress who is one of only four agents with a license to ensorcell.  (I think that was supposed to be humorous.  Since it wasn't, it's hard to be sure.)  Nola is supposed to be quite powerful, so it's a mystery why she has this vague, low-paying assignment.

She is assigned to work with an Israeli Interpol agent who is, of course, very good looking.  They instantly dislike each other for no reason I was able to discern, which of course meant that they would be a couple by the end of the novel.  Ari doesn't believe in her magical mumbo-jumbo, but he's tracking down a murderer who committed a couple of crimes in Israel and is now apparently in San Francisco.  Nola tries to help him out with her magic, which is described with such charming terms as Chaos Diagnostic Emergency Procedure and Search Mode: Personnel.

We are introduced to Nola's wacky magical family, all of whom are more interesting characters than her.  Ari decides she's in danger and moves in with her, and meanwhile they blow off her chaos-watching duties as they race around San Francisco with her screaming about his reckless driving.  Ho hum.  Then they have sex off screen.  We gradually learn that Nola starves herself to have a "fashionable" figure, and Ari tells her she has an eating disorder, after which she asks her brother-in-law to make a big gooey pan of lasagna for her, which seems not at all typical of people with eating disorders that I have known.  And yet for a woman who seems quite obsessed with her appearance, the way Kerr describes her clothing mostly does not work.  I cannot think of a single appearance-conscious young woman I know who would wear a tan corduroy skirt with a blue and white print blouse to work.  Perhaps in 1979.  But not in 2011.

Anyway, they know who the bad guys are and eventually track them down and kill them, and then the book limps on for another 80 pages or so and makes even less sense than it did before.  BIG SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!
  
Her brother Michael disappears into another dimension and she figures out how to get him back.  And in this alternate San Francisco, it had been bombed by German nukes in the 1930s, and now lots of people are deformed, and the two major street gangs identify with the Giants and the Dodgers -- as in, the baseball teams.  Who did not move to California until the late 1950s.  And why would they do so after it had been nuked?  Hmmm?  That makes no sense at all.  But then it also made absolutely no sense why the killers were killing the people they were, either.  Or several other things they did.  Really, no sense at all.

Between a plot that doesn't work, the book's apparent indecision about what kind of story it wanted to be, the boring and unlikeable lead, and the flat, dead, lifeless prose, this was a very tedious read.  This would have been a slog even if I hadn't just finished Moon Over Soho, which was vibrant, exciting, and enjoyable.  But this just isn't good.  I read this crap so that you don't have to.  Take my advice -- Avoid.

Moon over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

Moon over Soho is the sequel to Midnight Riot. It features PC Peter Grant, apprentice to Nightingale, the London Police's only practicing wizard.  Nightingale is still recovering from injuries received at the end of Midnight Riot, so Grant is left largely to his own devices as he investigates, only going to Nightingale to report and when he needs backup.

In Moon Over Soho, Grant learns more about magic, and more about magic users.  He has been told that Nightingale is really the only practicing wizard around any more, and we learn that this is because most of them were killed or messed up in World War II.  Prior to that there had been a school where young well-to-do men were trained in wizardry, but after the war there was really no one left to run it.  In this novel, however, they learn that the practice of magic is not quite so dead and gone as Nightingale had thought.  There is a powerful wizard out there making mischief, and it's up to Grant and Nightingale to find him and stop him.

The other problem Grant is looking into falls closer to home--jazz musicians are dying.  He doesn't know what is killing them, but it is clearly magical.  Grant's father is a great jazz musician who never quite made it big.  Thus Grant knows the music and to some extent knows the world of jazz.  And when he needs help tracking down a particular version of a particular song, he knows where to turn.  It is in this storyline that he disappointed me slightly.  One of the things I liked about Midnight Riot was that Grant, though young and new to all this, is not an idiot. He's clever and competent, and generally handles things well. Unfortunately in this book he was clearly being quite stupid and it took him way too long to figure it out.  Nevertheless he did eventually realize what was going on, so it worked out.

Like Midnight Riot, this is a high-action magical police procedural.  There are chase scenes and fight scenes and gory murders, and it's just a hell of a lot of fun.  Grant is a fleshed-out character with a fully realized personality and a real job.  This works for me both as a law enforcement story and as a fantasy, and is a wonderful example in a field that frequently disappoints me.

Further, Aaronovitch is very good at description.  He makes the city a real place, even though I've never been there.  As I have said before, I don't visualize much as I read, and I don't tend to process descriptive passages and long action scenes.  Mostly I'm not making pictures in my head, so I'm not "seeing" what the author is trying to convey.  But Aaronovitch is good at describing what something is like, not necessarily the details of its appearance, and that works better for me.  This is a random example:

The house had been built for the aspirational lower middle class so the hallway was narrow but well proportioned....The house had undergone the standard gentrification package, front room knocked through into the dining room, original oak floorboards sanded down, varnished, and covered in rugs.  The furniture looked John Lewis, expensive, comfortable, and unimaginative.

I can feel that place, imagine it, without ever needing to know what color the sofa is, or whether the walls are painted or wallpapered.   Frankly I don't care, but from that description I do know what the place is like.  I wish more writers could do this well.

Overall, these books are terrific.  Really, they're great, especially for people who enjoy both fantasy and crime-solving stories.  Highly recommended.  You should read it.  Now.  Go on, buy Midnight Riot.  You won't regret it.