Reading Roundup - December

An unfortunate title, as all Google
searches go first to the song from The
Hunger Games.

There's been a death among the bright young things of London. The daughter of the Goddess of the River Tyburn is involved, and to repay a debt Peter Grant - the Met's only apprentice magician - is to make sure that no-one knows that. It is a debt that he utterly fails to repay, but that soon becomes the least of his problems as a lost work by Sir Isaac Newton appears and is pursued by at least two other groups considering themselves the heirs to the great man's legacy, and a series of unnecessarily horrible deaths surrounding the original murder hint that someone has inadvertently angered the Folly's nemesis, the Faceless Man. On the upside, if the old Faceless is going after Lady Tyburn's daughter, Grant might just have another chance to pay back his debt.

The Hanging Tree is the sixth novel in the Rivers of London series, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's the sixth story or you'll be baffled by references to Russian sorcerers and self-driving cars. The comics are full on canon and don't you forget it(1). We return to London after the dreamy rural idyll of Foxglove Summer, and both Grant and Aaronovich are on firmer ground for a case which brings us round one of the long awaited throwdown between the Folly and the Faceless Man, as well as introducing two new factions in the form of an American paranormal PMC and a matriarchal counterpoint to the traditional Newtonian sausage fest.

This was the first of the series I'd come to as an audiobook, and Kobna Holbrook-Smith more than justified his continued employment as the series narrator, bringing Grant's distinctive voice to life.

Soon to add 'soon to be a major motion
picture' to its cover.

The Screaming Staircase is the first in a series of YA paranormal mystery novels featuring Lockwood & Co, one of a large number of agencies who deal with the UK's major ghost problem. With seeing, tracking and thus containing ghosts largely the purview of the young, most agencies use adult supervisors, but Lockwood & Co is owned and run by teenagers, specifically the titular Lockwood. A charming, reckless, slightly Peter Pannish youth, Lockwood recruits narrator Lucy Carlyle to join his agency alongside the book smart George. When they stumble on a long-cold murder case the exposure attracts a millionaire industrialist, who asks them to cleanse one of the most haunted mansions in the country; a job which could be the making of the agency... or the death of them all.

The book does a good deal of world-building and character introduction, but also has a fine plot of its own and a wonderfully villainous villain. Oddly, I kept thinking it was set around the Victorian era, rather than in an alternate modern day, possibly because of the swords, or the widespread use of child labour (for reasons of spiritual sensitivity.) I've been a fan of Stroud since the Bartimaeus trilogy, albeit I've not followed him closely and there are now about half a dozen Lockwood & Co books for me to catch up on, but them's the breaks.

Miranda Raison's reading was excellent.

Like Goldfinger, but more so.

And speaking of YA authors I touch base with occasionally, Goldenhand is the latest in the occasional Old Kingdom series. Following directly from the short story 'Nicholas Sayre and the Creature in the Case', it follows Nicholas and Abhorsen-in-Waiting Lirael as they faff around the Clayr glacier arguing snittily about librarians and obviously fancying the ever-loving pants off each other, while to the north of the Old Kingdom (because it turns out there is a north of the Old Kingdom) a young woman is struggling to bring a years-old message to warn Lirael of the danger still posed by 'the Witch Without a Face.'

As my summary may suggest, I found Goldenhand to be an awkwardly balanced book. Ferin's mission is all urgency and good people falling under the plot bus while waiting for the badasses to arrive, but the Lirael and Nick bits are basically a comedy of manners, intercut with the life or death stuff. For my money, it would have worked better to focus on Lirael until she hears news of the message, then cut back to what Ferin has been up to (chases, violence, death and sacrifice.)

I confess, I was also a little disappointed that this is the end of Chlorr of the Mask, who from her introduction in Clariel frankly deserved to be more than a sinister presence, but then Nix has never been good at... No, scratch that; has never really been one to give screen time to his villains. I don't think it's that he can't write them; he chooses not to. Even the human antagonists barely get a mention, and the northern tribes in particular end up as a literal faceless horde.

The performance by Heather Wilds was not one of the best I've heard. It's not the worst, but it doesn't bring the book to life and makes the slow sections drag.

(1) Note to self, acquire comics.