Aaronovitch, Ben -- Midnight Riot [e-book purchase]
This is the other end of the spectrum from the Midnight Mayor series:
London urban fantasy, with all its modern multicultural juice, but
built on London cop bureaucracy with the fantasy layered on top. The
protagonist meets magic and starts experimenting with cell-phone
batteries, rather than (e.g.) taking a flying leap into a
hallucinatory cloud of fantasy alterworld. It is well done as a police
procedural, but I prefer the flying-leap Gaiman-or-Kate-Griffin style,
so I was slow getting into this.
(Also, the real-life grounding made the horrific supernatural crimes a
little too brutal for my taste. I guess it bothers me less when it's a
thug with a sword doing it to fantasy palace guards. Now you know.)
All that said, the supernatural pace picks up slowly as the book goes
along, until it's a giant chewy ball of spirit-journey bouncing
cheerily downhill into the tenpins of sanity and sense. And the police
procedural stuff is good, with clues and sneaky villains and
everything. So I am with this series and will read the next one.
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