Whenever I come across a “I’ve read all of The Dresden Files, now what?” discussion, one of the series that always seems to come up is Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London. They’re not entirely the same, but I get why people cross recommend them.

Basically, we have a London cop who stumbles upon a mysterious killing, questions a ghost, gets recruited by the ‘magical’ side of the London police, ends up meeting and befriending several rivers (see, the title! Also, it ends up making more sense in the story), and saves the day.

“Are they really gods?"

“I never worry about theological questions,” said Nightingale. “They exist, they have power and they can breach the Queen’s peace - that makes them a police matter.”

More or less.

I think my favorite part of the series (so far) is the humor, most especially the sheer Britishness of it (not being British, I have no idea how accurate it all is, but it’s good enough for me!).

He was from Yorkshire, or somewhere like that, and like many Northerners with issues, he’d moved to London as a cheap alternative to psychotherapy.

Oh, and also picking fun at it’s own genre of course.

“You put a spell on the dog,” I said as we left the house.
“Just a small one,” said Nightingale.
“So magic is real,” I said. “Which makes you a…what?”
“A wizard.”
“Like Harry Potter?”
Nightingale sighed. “No,” he said. “Not like Harry Potter.”
“In what way?”
“I’m not a fictional character,” said Nightingale.”

Second up, the introductions of magic. Any world where the characters try to treat magic as a science and figure out how in the world it really works is a great one in my book.

There’s an awful lot of hinted at worldbuilding there. I hope and expect to see a lot more of that in future books. We’ll just have to see which way all that goes.

Also also, having recently decided that learning Latin was just a great idea as our main character (although for (un)fortunately different reasons I suppose):

Carved above the lintel were the words SCIENTIA POTESTAS EST. Science points east, I wondered? Science is portentous, yes? Science protests too much. Scientific potatoes rule. Had I stumbled on the lair of dangerous plant geneticists?

😄

Spoilers, I guess. 😄

Overall, I had a lot of fun with this book. I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here!