Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovitch

I've been falling behind on these posts--I read whole novels faster than I can write short reactions.

So I'm going to wrap up several at once here. Recently I've reread the first four Rivers of London novels--all via audio--and also read the first two graphic novels for the first time. 

Fan art of characters from the series, from AgarthanGuide, here.

First, a reaction to the series as a whole: The Rivers of London series is also known as the Peter Grant series, and Peter is our point-of-view character in almost every story. (The novellas, short stories, and graphic novels sometimes feature other main characters.) Peter Grant is the mixed-race, bicultural son of a somewhat famous London jazz musician father and a Sierra Leonian housecleaner mother, and in the first novel he is just graduating from training as a member of the London Metropolitan Police.

In the course of things, he ends up displaying a talent for magic--which exists! It's not a huge secret, but it's not well-known. And the Met has a branch for dealing with the supernatural, but it consists of one wizard, Thomas Nightingale, who despite being over a century old looks to be in his 40s.

There's a lot of things I love about these modern-fantasy/police-procedural mysteries. The magic system is really good, and while I was imagining how to adapt it to a TRPG campaign, surprise surprise Aaronovitch and Chaosium struck a deal and produced an apparently very good TRPG game using the Basic Roleplaying System, which is exactly what I would have chosen. I really need to get a copy of that, even though I'll probably never be able to find a group of players. 

The audiobooks are mostly read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, one of my favorite narrators. He's pretty much perfect for these books, though when he tries to do a Scottish accent or a Southern US accent, the results are pretty laughable. But hey, he's otherwise amazing, and I can't do a good Scottish or even British accent either, so this Southern/Midwestern American can easily overlook it.

There are a lot of characters I feel affection for--Beverly Brook, Abigail, poor quietly suffering from PTSD Nightingale, Peter himself--but the one I always felt heartbroken over is Lesley May, the smart, pretty, funny colleague that Peter has a crush on, who [SPOILERS]

[just assume spoilers from here on, OK?]

through no fault of her own gets possessed by a ghost who just for a laugh totally destroys her face. She is saved by multiple surgeries and over the course of the next few novels regains the ability to speak, though really there's no way to restore her to anything like she was before. Her words slur, her skin needs special care to keep from splitting, her face frightens the normies. 

A few years ago, my wife lost most of her hearing. She had loved singing and listening to music, and now music had become ugly, incomprehensible noise to her, even with hearing aids. She was deeply traumatized, falling into a depression that I'm 100% sure would have been fatal if I hadn't found her the right doctor. I was terrified...I seriously thought I was going to lose her. It took well over a year to get to the point where she was out of danger, and a lot longer before she felt "ok." She may never fully come out of it.

Now imagine if it was your face, the way you interact with the world. Imagine if, just a little while ago, your face made people smile, and now it makes them recoil. Imagine it's not just a scar, or the gradual, inevitable effects of age, but a change at least as bad as an acid attack, in some ways worse, and all because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I can understand how Lesley gets recruited by an antagonist wizard who says he can restore her face to her. There's not many who wouldn't go to the dark side for that. But there are hints that it's more than that. Starting even with the first book, Lesley is gradually adopting a "rules and laws don't matter--we just have to do whatever we think is right" attitude, not just because of what happened to her face, but because the same ghost who hurt her also murdered a child that she couldn't save, and as she is disillusioned by Nightingale's occasional failure to follow procedures and laws because sometimes they just can't be applied to supernatural people (like that ghost). In D&D terms, one could say that Lesley goes from being Lawful Good to True Neutral. And she's not just trying to get her face back: she wants to stop Mr Punch, her ghostly attacker, from ever hurting anyone again by killing him. She's willing to aid a criminal to learn the power she needs to do that. And in gaining such power, someone who was helpless once becomes empowered to protect herself. Yeah, I don't blame Lesley a bit for wanting to become a powerful wizard, even if her motives aren't exactly pure, and even if her path requires her to do some bad things.