And, as the battle ebbs and flows over those three days, you begin to realise that there are no heroes in this book. For this conflict is one of total and utter pointlessness, one in which lives are lost and destroyed for no discernible reason. There is no reason to fight this battle. No land or gold to be had. Only some crops and a scattering of farms. Worse than this, it is a battle being fought merely in order that a more important battle can be fought somewhere else and at another time.

In many ways this novel is an indictment of war and the haplessness of officers and commanders who sacrifice the lives of their soldiers through their pure incompetence. And yet, at the same time [and I don't feel in the slightest bit guilty for saying this], The Heroes is fast-paced and bloody and a hugely entertaining read that I went through in only a couple of days.

The cast of characters is massive, but once again Abercrombie shows himself to be a dab hand at showing readers new sides to characters that have previously served as minor figures in the previous novels set in the world of The First Law. So, in The Heroes one of the major Point-of-View figures is ‘Prince’ Calder, who was last seen in Last Argument of Kings, lurking in the shadows with a flatbow as The Bloody-Nine fought for his life. And yet in The Heroes, despite being fairly unlikeable to start with, Calder evolves. In many ways he can be seen as very similar to Jezal dan Luthar from The First Law trilogy, in the manner that he starts out as a self-centred fool and evolves [well, a bit!].

Then there is Bremer dan Gorst, who has appeared briefly in all of Abercrombie’s novels to date – but always as an adjunct to far more important characters and events. Here, after events in Best Served Cold, he finds himself in disgrace and sent away from his place beside the King of the Union to be with the army. Burning with guilt and resentment, Gorst is desperate to prove his mettle and gain himself redemption, and thus flings himself recklessly into battle [and trying to be a 'hero'].

They are fantastically well done, and it was great to see them being fleshed-out in this novel. Being completely honest though, what I loved most about this book was the way in which the reader gets to see other old characters through the eyes of these new Point-of-View characters – so The Dogman, Black Dow, Yoru Sulfur and Bayaz, all make appearances and it is interesting to see how others perceive them and to look at them in a new light.

And this most applied to my favourite character from the earlier books, Caul Shivers. Shivers started off life in The First Law universe as a fairly laid-back figure [literally. In his first appearance in Before They Are Hanged he was lazing in a tree when he met the Dogman!]. And over the course of Best Served Cold he tried to become a better man. But now, horribly scarred and with a metal eye and a croaky whisper for a voice, he could well be the cruelest character in all of Abercrombie’s books – which is really saying something.

Having seen him as a main Point-of-View character before, it is fascinating to see the fear that he inspires in other people in The Heroes. And, so brutal is he at points in this novel, that I started to wonder whether my previous attachment to him as a character was clouding my judgement of him in this book!

And this is where I do wonder at the idea of calling this a standalone novel. Yes, it is undoubtedly a self-contained novel that can be read, and enjoyed immensely, without having read the previous books. But, just like with his previous novel, Best Served Cold, I really do think that you miss a lot of the nuances, in-jokes [there is still a refusal to name the King of the Union and there were a couple of tantalizing mentions of a major character from Best Served Cold who I hope will be returning soon - well, three to be exact] and the brilliance of the world that Abercrombie has created if you haven’t read the books that came before this one .

However, that isn’t to say that this doesn’t work on its own – because it really does. Looking at it on its own, I can assure you that this is a dazzling and captivating fantasy novel that really puts you at the heart of the violence and action. You can really see Abercrombie growing as a writer and trying out really exciting and innovative new techniques which made this novel feel really fresh to read, especially for someone like me who has read a lot in the genre over the years.

One example of this originality of approach comes in the first major battle sequence, where Abercrombie selects a character and shows the battle through their eyes. Right up until the point that they are killed. Then he moves to the view-point of the person who killed them, and follows them until their death. And so on. It is really clever as an idea, but it is made to work by the way in which Abercrombie is able to make us relate to these characters, even though they are very minor, and also makes us able to feel their fear in the swirling, chaotic mass of the battlefield.

And this, once again, is what makes Abercrombie so good. The characterisation is detailed and believable, with some of the characters learning and evolving from their experiences, whilst others appear to learn precisely nothing from the violence and slaughter. And the battle scenes are a delight [although probably not for the legion of, fictional, figures who meet the Great Leveller in this novel]. It’s definitely a hefty book, but I couldn’t put it down and am now hankering for my next fix of the world of The First Law.

The central character around whom this carnage tends to coalesce, is mercenary general Monzcarro Murcatto – Monza to her friends [well, it would be, if she had any]; The Snake of Talins and The Butcher of Caprile to those who aren’t quite so enamoured of her and her military ‘methods’.

When her beloved brother is murdered and she is betrayed and abandoned for dead by her employer, Monza is left with only a burning desire to exact vengeance on the seven people she holds responsible. It’s like a very bloody, very brutal version of The Count of Monte Cristo.

Revenge is a well-established trope in the fantasy genre [just look at David Gemmell’s Waylander novels] and pretty much every character in Best Served Cold is seeking some kind of vengeance. But, what sets this novel apart from the other revenge narratives is the manner in which Abercrombie fills his pages with a complex and evolving set of characters in an intriguing, well-developed world. And, crucially, and at odds with many fantasy revenge narratives, there is very little in the way of redemption in this novel [the final chapter is called ‘Happy Endings’ but after the morally ambiguous six hundred and fifty odd pages that have gone before, you know that this title is humour of the blackest kind!].

To exact this revenge, Monza recruits herself a very motley crew. Among them Caul Shivers, a warrior Northman failing at becoming a better man [and previously seen in Before They Are Hanged and Last Argument of Kings]; Friendly, a numbers-obsessed serial murderer; an arrogant poisoner and his gluttonous assistant; a female ex-torturer; and the alcoholic old mercenary captain that Monza usurped prior to her own betrayal.

Personally I found myself inexorably drawn to Monza and Shivers as characters, despite their many flaws. In fact, so flawed is Monza that the only reason that she isn’t a Villain Protagonist at the outset of the novel is because there is no-one else ‘better’ than her. And yet, despite other characters repeatedly referring to her as an ‘evil bitch’, there was something about her that I found myself liking and ultimately rooting for, which I can’t seem to explain. And both her and Shivers – in completely contrasting manners – evolve over the course of the book, often in ways that you don’t expect as a reader.

And it wasn’t until about two-thirds of the way through the novel that I realised that both Shivers and Monza seemed incredibly similar to a couple of characters from George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Monza, a renowned duellist, loses the use of one hand and has to learn to fight with her other hand. And she has an ‘unorthodox’ relationship with a family member, and then subsequently becomes a better person when separated from that family member. And Shivers, a violent but incredibly loyal bodyguard and mercenary, who loathes his brother and ends up horribly disfigured. I leave it up to you, dear reader, to make the relevant connections, but there was definitely a light-bulb moment when I realised who Shivers and Monza were parallels of in Martin’s books.

With his brilliant use of narrative voice, grammar and vocabulary to distinguish his POV characters, and his adept and complex world building, Abercrombie continues to be at the vanguard of Low Fantasy. But Best Served Cold is so morally ambiguous that Abercrombie almost manages to out-Abercrombie himself. It is his meanest, most violent book to date, and even the shades of grey are dripping with gore.

If I had one slight criticism then it would be that the numerous references to Abercrombie’s first three books and to characters and events in The First Law world could be quite confusing to someone coming to Best Served Cold as their first Abercrombie novel. It does work as a standalone, but I could imagine that if I hadn’t read the previous three books then there would have been a lot of things that would have gone over my head.

Filled with – amongst numerous other things – foul language, incest, murder [lots of it], deceit and betrayal, squirmingly embarrassing sex scenes, a cannibal assassin, a lot of scars [you apparently can’t be a character in Abercrombie’s world unless you have a physical peculiarity or visible injury],  and a lot of violence Best Served Cold is, like all of Abercrombie’s novels, not for the faint of heart. And, I have to admit that I saw the ending coming from a long way off [which made the eternal romantic in my heart hope that it wasn’t going to end that way. It did!]. Nevertheless, Best Served Cold is a relentless and brilliant read and certainly my favourite of Abercrombie’s novels to date – even if it did leave me a little depressed when I finished. But in a good way…!

Set against the harsh and uncompromising backdrop of 1920s Alaska, the plot revolves around its two principle protagonists, Jack and Mabel – an aging and childless couple feeling the strain as the Alaskan winter descends. Mabel, still grieving from a stillbirth ten years previous, feels isolated and alone. Jack, desperately trying to eke out a living for the couple, never smiles and rarely talks.

One night, as the snow falls around their cabin, and in a rare moment of playfulness and togetherness they decide to build a small child from snow – giving the child a scarf and mittens, and sculpting her face into that of a little girl. But the next morning they discover that the snow child has disappeared, and in its place they find only a small pile of snow and a set of footprints leading away from their cabin. And, as they soon discover, the snow child seems to have been replaced by a small, blonde-haired girl. One who will shape their lives in very different ways in the time to come.

The story itself is based on, and inspired by, Arthur Ransome’s translation of an old Russian folk tale [which is included at the back of the hardback edition of the novel]. And the reason why it works so well in The Snow Child is down to the manner in which Ivey carefully, and cleverly, ensures that she manages to maintain a balance between the magical and the real. As a reader we are never entirely sure whether the little girl is a flesh and blood being or not. And this puts us in exactly the same position that Jack and Mabel find themselves.

And this dissonance between the solid and the imagined is further added to by the stark, sparse, alien Alaskan landscape that Ivey brings to life in the novel, and by the claustrophobic isolation that Jack and Mabel experience in their remote cabin. Mabel begins to question her sanity. And who wouldn’t? Locked in the small confines of their log cabin, it isn’t a surprise that you begin to wonder whether cabin fever may be setting in.

Ivey, who lives in Alaska, brings the landscape to life with prose that never tries to be ostentatious, and thus always fits in with the environment and people that it is bringing to life on the page. And the plot itself had an almost glacial quality. This is not to say that it was slow, but rather that there is an almost inexorable quality about reading the novel. I found myself reading at what I thought was a far slower pace than my normal [extremely fast] pace, and then realizing that I had gone through a huge swathe of the book without really noticing myself do that.

A book that is by turns uplifting and tragic, The Snow Child, like the fairy tales that were its precursors, avoids any sort of happily ever after ending. And in our saccharine Hollywood-ised society that is certainly something to be grateful for.

Yes, in Pronto and Riding the Rap he was somewhat of a hick, but in ‘Fire in the Hole’ and Raylan he has matured into a character that holds the reader’s attention. Maybe it is his attire – cowboy boots and hat – and his Southern good manners. Or the fact that he is a throwback to a bygone age – a quick-draw lawman. Or just that he gets to say some wonderfully laconic lines – at one point in Raylan he describes Ava Crowder as looking like “a double-dip ice-cream cone in that yella dress.”

The new novel involves three loosely connected stories involving our eponymous protagonist, lots of guns and a disparate collection of villainous men and femme fatales in Harlan County, Kentucky, where feuding backwoods families, pot farmers and a heavy-handed mining company vie for supremacy. In the first arc, Raylan tracks a hospital transplant nurse who runs her own criminal enterprise – seducing, drugging and removing men’s kidneys, before selling them for ten thousand dollars apiece. Then there’s the female Vice President of a Kentucky mining company, intent on getting control of the land held by the local people – either by honeyed words and the lure of money, or with a Glock. And, in the third and final story, Raylan gets involved with Jackie Nevada – a college girl and high-stakes poker player who is also a minor fugitive. And this leads him to pursue a trio of stoned strippers who rob banks…

If you are a fan of the television series – as I am – then you will no doubt have quickly realised that elements of the novel have appeared in the television show. This is especially true of the second, mining plotline – which was a major theme in the second season of Justified [and the first arc, involving organ-trafficking is supposed to be a theme in the forthcoming third season].

Inevitably, this leads to a slightly schizophrenic reading experience if you are, like me, familiar with both Leonard’s oeuvre and Justified. Because a number of elements of Raylan are both completely the same as the television show, but also radically different. The reason, I discovered, that this almost meta-quality exists between the novel and the television show, where the two intertwine and diverge, is down to the vagaries of scheduling in the book publishing world [Leonard sent an early draft of Raylan to the show’s producer before the second season and said that he could mine – pun completely intended – the manuscript for plot ideas for the show!].

If I had one negative about the novel, then it would be that the three plot arcs are very loosely connected – at times almost feeling like they were three different episodes from the television show – and might have worked better as three separate novellas, with Raylan as the glue binding them together.

But, in a way, the disparate nature of the plot becomes just another quirky way in which Leonard avoids being too caught up in the rules and constraints of crime fiction. The focus is, instead, upon Leonard’s trademark prose – which often lets go of ‘proper usage and grammar’ – snappy dialogue, rat-a-tat narrative and the phalanx of fascinating characters that always frequent his works.

Filled with brilliant scenes – the one in which Raylan wakes up, groggy, drugged and naked in a bathtub but for his cowboy boots, as his attackers prepare to remove his kidneys,was a particular favourite of mine – Raylan is a fast-paced, absorbing read, from one of the doyens of the genre.

Clammy, claustrophobic and filled with suspense, Neville has produced a taut novel that never lets up. It is a thriller of the highest order.

From the grisly opening scene in a small Belfast bedroom, where a young Ukrainian sex slave, Galya Petrova, murders the Lithuanian trafficker who is about to rape her, Stolen Souls grips like a vice and refuses to let go until the final page has turned.  And at the centre of it all is Galya. Tricked into leaving her homeland in search of work, she has been trafficked into prostitution. And, when she manages to escape from her captors but finds herself alone and on the run from the brutal henchmen of a ruthless criminal, Arturas Strazdas – who wants to extract his revenge upon the ‘property’ that killed his little brother.

The only person that she can call on is the man who gave her a silver cross and a phone number. The man who claims he can help her escape. But as Galya is about to discover, appearances can be deceptive…

Searching for her, as the clock ticks inexorably, is DI Jack Lennon [not to be confused with Jack Lemmon!!], who returns for his third novel in the series. Plagued by guilt after the death of his young daughter’s mother in Collusion, Jack is – like Galya – an increasingly isolated figure, in a world mired in corruption and danger.

But, whilst Lennon remains a fascinating and deeply flawed character, and an integral cog in the plot, it is Galya who is the novel’s beating heart and soul [title pun not intended – promise!!]. She’s a victim of circumstance and of bad luck, but you know that she will never give up – her inner strength will not allow it, and she is certainly a far cry from the stereotypical ‘damsel-in-distress’ found in crime fiction. From the moment that the reader meets her on the first page, with blood on her hands and two thugs beating on the room’s locked door, you find yourself rooting for her – desperate for her to escape and survive. And Neville puts us inside her head brilliantly, revealing her past, her hopes and her fears, and her atavistic drive to survive.

And, when she finds herself locked in a fortified old house in an industrial wasteland, hemmed in by locked doors and tempered glass windows, with no way of calling for help, you find yourself sharing her fears as Neville remorselessly ratchets up the tension and the already relentless pace.

At a little over three hundred pages in length, Stolen Souls is a seriously stripped, fast-paced thriller. Lean beyond belief, with all extraneous matter carved away, its rattling pace is further amplified by Neville’s brilliant use of short, punchy chapters and tightly controlled prose. Dark and bloody, Stolen Souls is certainly not for the faint-of-heart and you can certainly imagine Belfast’s Tourism Board being rather put out by Neville’s depiction of the city’s seedy and vicious underworld! An engrossing and pulse-pounding thriller from an author who just gets better and better with each book.

So, for me – a self-confessed O’Connell addict – the release of a new novel featuring the inimitable Kathy Mallory is something to be savoured. A beautiful sociopathic NYPD detective, Kathy [never, ever Kathleen!] is – as the shoutline on The Chalk Girl’s cover makes clear – a prototype and forerunner for Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander. Like Salander, Kathy is a constant outsider – unable to relate to those around her or feel empathy.

I have always been addicted to – and fascinated by – damaged characters in fiction. From Estella in Great Expectations [Dickens’s version rather than the recent BBC butchering of the character by making her nice!], to Salander [who was, for me, the only thing that made Larsson’s series more than just your average Scandi-crime books], to Dorothy Dunnett’s Francis Crawford of Lymond [in the incredible Lymond Chronicles series], and on to Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent [whose destructive ‘relationship’ with his wife, Angie Polaski, continues to fascinate], all are characters that I think that readers are drawn to because they want to understand and ‘fix’ them.

But Mallory stands supreme and triumphant over all of them – a fascinating mass of contradictions that I still haven’t worked out, even after ten novels! Tall, beautiful, with angelically curly blonde hair, catlike green eyes and a penchant for made-to-measure, designer cashmere blazers, Mallory seems more like a model than a detective. And yet she undercuts this image of femininity [and it is very much a constructed ‘image’] by her choice of firearm – a .357 Smith & Wesson [think of the hand cannon that Clint Eastwood waved around in Dirty Harry and you are on the right tracks!].

Like Salander, Mallory is also an incredibly good hacker and is more than willing to bend – and often break – the rules, in order to get what she wants. Indeed, rather than use the authority of her NYPD badge, she is more likely to flash her .357 to elicit fear and get things accomplished in a far speedier fashion.

The Chalk Girl sees Mallory – after Shark Music’s Route 66 setting – returning to her natural environment, New York. When a smiling, red-haired, bloodstained little girl named Coco is discovered in Central Park, she leads the police to discover a body in a tree. And in Coco Mallory recognizes a kindred spirit, one who leads her to uncover a years-old story of murder, violence, blackmail and cruelty. Cruelty that only someone with Mallory’s dark, dark past would understand…

As a novel, The Chalk Girl bears all of the hallmarks that have become associated with an O’Connell novel – there’s the raft of eccentric characters, the slightly surreal occurrences and the tight, dense, almost ‘floaty’ prose-style. I also loved the manner in which O’Connell uses Coco brings out a new, almost alien, side of Mallory – one where she almost seems to engage and care for someone. In many ways Coco can be read as a mini-Mallory [one at that point of her life when she needs a Markowitz-type to take her in – Louis Marcowitz having been the detective who, with his wife, adopted the wild young Mallory].

The one thing that did strike me is that the main characters – Mallory, Riker and Charles Butler – all seem to be slightly more accessible than they were in the early novels. This is especially true in the case of Mallory, who is far less disassociated and sociopathic in The Chalk Girl than at any other point in the series [which, you would imagine, will make her far more palatable for an audience that has been made more receptive to fictional sociopathic protagonists by the success of Stieg Larsson’s books and Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series].

Ultimately, I absolutely loved The Chalk Girl – although, quite frankly, I’m highly biased. Whilst it certainly isn’t quite on a par with my favourite O’Connell novels, Flight of the Stone Angel and Bone By Bone, The Chalk Girl is still an exceptional piece of crime fiction and I doubt that many books published in the genre this year will come close to it. Something to be read slowly and carefully – and to be savoured.

Rose’s novels aren’t a series. At least not in the conventional crime fiction sense. But, occasionally, there is overlap between books – usually in the form of a character from one book reappearing in another novel. And, as I was reading No One Left To Tell, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I recognised its heroine – and principal protagonist – the beautiful martial arts expert and aspiring PI Paige Holden from somewhere else.

Try as I might though, I could not work out why she was so familiar. And it was starting to annoy me…

Until Paige was phoned by her friend, Olivia. And then I realised where I had seen Paige before. Because Olivia Sutherland and David Hunter were the main characters – and romantic leads – in Rose’s 2010 novel, Silent Scream. And Paige had been Olivia’s best friend! Somehow, despite the fact that it had been almost two years since I read Silent Scream [a period of time in which I had read hundreds of other books], something about Paige had stood out as a character – even though she had played a fairly minor role in Silent Scream.

So, itch finally scratched, I was able to settle down and devour the rest of No One Left To Tell.

The novel’s plot and themes are fairly well-trodden Rose territory. Paige, beautiful but unlucky-in-love, comes into possession of the only piece of evidence that could exonerate a man serving a life sentence for a murder that he didn’t commit. And when the man’s fiancé is murdered, Paige – unable to turn to the police – must rely on the help of District Attorney Grayson Smith to expose a huge cover-up and capture a ruthless killer, one who is interested in Paige herself. And, of course, this task isn’t made any easier by the devastatingly attractive [!!] Grayson and the feelings that Paige feels for him – and he for her…

I have to admit that I found the opening sections of the book – where a raft of characters and numerous backstory elements are introduced – quite a lot to get my head around. There are a lot of characters and point-of-view arcs and processing it was quite difficult at first. But once the novel got into its swing – and I managed to work out who everyone was! – I found myself caught up in the twists, violence, and most of all in the romantic travails of Paige and Grayson.

And, for me, it is the romantic aspect to Rose’s novels that has me coming back time-and-again. There is something quite moreish about the Hollywood-like, over-the-top nature of Rose’s characters and their love lives. I am not normally one who goes for romance [especially in crime fiction], but there is something about the way that Rose writes it that makes me need to read her books. Perhaps it is the confidence, glamour and American-ness of her books that makes them work so well [you certainly couldn’t imagine the themes and tropes of No One Left To Tell working if they were set in most other countries around the world!]. Or the fact that Rose does strong, independent [well, except for their romantic yearnings!] women so well.

Whatever the reason, it is a formula that has made me an addict, and I thoroughly enjoyed being transported by Rose’s latest slice of glamorous American crime fiction as the wind and rain battered the windows of my house in grey old unglamorous London!!!

And then, little-by-little, I realised that I had stumbled straight into the trap that I had read Ronson stumbling into only a short time before. Because Hare’s checklist is so seductively simple and easy to understand that it reels you in before you know it. Much like the title of this book.

For The Psychopath Test is not actually exclusively about psychopaths – even thought the name might suggest that it is.

I can certainly see why Ronson and the publisher decided to use the title. It is very strong and does grab your attention. But it proves to be something of a misnomer, as only part of the book really deals with psychopaths and psychopathy.

For the book also deals with – and explores – psychiatry, the incarceration of ‘dangerous’ individuals, the prevalence of medication in contemporary society, and how we recognise and deal with ‘madness’ in society. In fact, it is the book’s subheading – A Journey Through The Madness Industry – that best describes the scope of Ronson’s topics [but it would be a remarkably boring and uncatchy title, so I’m not surprised that it was kept as a subheading!].

Written with the wit and clear, uncluttered style that has become Ronson’s trademark [he is the author of Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats], The Psychopath Test is an incredibly engaging, page-turning read – not something that I normally would associate with non-fiction books on mental illness.

Reading in many ways like a mystery novel – it starts with a mysterious manuscript that has been sent to various academics around the world – the book finds Ronson undertaking an incredible, surreal journey that brings him into contact with a gallery of fascinating, odd, occasionally dangerous people, often from the fringes of society or at the very least from the fringes of normal behaviour. So you find Scientologists, psychopaths-next-door, the leader of a Haitian death squad, and a cross-dressing former MI5 agent rubbing shoulders on the page.

The gonzo-style of Ronson’s narration – along with the manner in which he blends the various stories together – sometimes makes you wonder whether it is in fact a work of non-fiction at all. So surreal and weird are some of the situations that he finds himself in that you could be forgiven for believing that it was made up [but rest assured, frequent jaunts onto the internet whilst reading The Psychopath Test by your truly revealed that everything that Ronson talks about is real!].

And there is something about his ‘character’ in the book that is so naïve and disingenuous that people are willing to open up to him. Indeed, the guards at one institution that he visited laughed at him for looking like Harry Potter [just look at the author image in the back of the book and you will see quite how apt a description this is!].

But, whilst I found this an incredibly fascinating book to read, it was not without its negatives. In fact, its major strength is also its major weakness. It is such a quick and easily digestible read, skipping as it does from surreal story to surreal story, that Ronson is able to raise a number of serious and focused questions [such as the appalling number of children in contemporary society – especially America – who are being prescribed drugs for their ‘mental illnesses’] but is rarely able to go beneath the surface in any one area.

Of course, it should be remembered that it is a massive area that Ronson is trying to cover, and it would be impossible to cover everything – and go into great detail on each section – in only 287 pages. For, in The Psychopath Test Ronson is – to quote one of his journalist friends – like a “medieval monk … stitching together a tapestry of people’s craziness. You take a little bit of craziness from up there and a little bit of craziness from over there and then you stitch it all together.”

There are undoubtedly longer, weightier, more serious books on psychopathy and the realm of mental illness out there, but none of them will manage to be as witty, serious, horrifying and wonderfully absorbing as Ronson’s manages to be. Highly recommended.

Although this intense affection for the city I have grown up in means that I am also quite demanding when it comes to fiction set in its environs. Luckily though, within only a few pages of starting Rivers of London and being introduced to young PC Peter Grant through his first-person narrative, I knew that I wasn’t going to be disappointed. Rivers of London is a long love letter to London and the city is brilliantly realised – one of the main reasons why this book works so well.

Peter Grant is saved from a life of boring paperwork in the Metropolitan Police when he gets a tip-off on a recent bloody murder. The only problem is that the witness is a ghost! His almost-but-not-quite girlfriend [Peter fancies him, but she seems oblivious to this fact] – who has just received a plum posting to the Murder Squad – is profoundly sceptical [but then, who wouldn’t be?]. But for Peter it is his first glimpse into a new, and unseen, world. And soon he finds himself apprenticed to the last working English wizard, Thomas Nightingale [who also works for the Met].

But this is a real apprenticeship – where results are gained through hard work and bloody-minded persistence, rather than waving a magic wand around and spouting made-up words. And the way in which the police procedural elements are woven into the plot feels convincing – Aaronovitch has obviously put a lot of thought into how a magical division would slot into the Met and the combination of scientific and procedural-led investigation with the utilization of magic never feels too jarring.

And, as in all of the best urban fantasy, what makes Rivers of London work so well is the confident way in which Aaronovitch juxtaposes the ‘real’ London and its oblivious inhabitants with the unknown, ‘other’ side to the city that is just below the surface.  So there are vampires, trolls, a ghostly magistrate, a nymph, and warring river spirits – who are brilliantly personified and seem to be influenced by their locations.

That’s not to say that Rivers of London is perfect as a novel. There were a few sections in which there was slightly too much exposition, certainly for my liking, and a couple of the plot resolutions didn’t entirely make sense.

But, it shouldn’t be forgotten that this is the author’s debut novel and I thought that the blend of gruesome murder hunt and otherworldy politicking worked brilliantly. And it is a quintessentially English type of novel – wry, witty and knowing, with just the right amount of darkness and black humour to make it fizz along.