False Value: Book 8 in the #1 bestselling Rivers of London series (A Rivers of London novel)

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Tyrel and Stacy Johnson are another nice normal addition to Peter's list of acquaintances who could possibly become friends later on in the series.

It makes since; Aaronovitch tends to be light on descriptives, so a good actor can bring the character to life. The genii loci of the Thames river and their children, the gods and goddesses of the river’s tributaries, are especially great. Again like you, I got all the references but they were not required and I felt extremely sorry for non English readers because it would be very hard to struggle through.A technology that stretches back to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, and forward to the future of artificial intelligence. Everything in this installment of the series is exactly what I’d been missing from the last two books, The Hanging Tree and Lies Sleeping, and it’s such a breath of fresh air to see the arch moving away from Lesley May and the Faceless Man mystery and see it heading into something new and exciting.

Since the SCC originated from the US, Peter asks Reynolds to look into its background and the head of the company (Terrence Skinner). Fans of Jim Butcher’s fabulously well to do Harry Dresden series may have noticed that some of the books wore thin and lost some of the early charm, but were still good books, still fun, still drawing on and expending the magic world building. Still, most of the humor that I associate with the series seems to come from the tech-mogul’s conceit of naming his corporation and referencing all the roles within from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Agent Reynolds of the FBI (and the one-person X-Files division) also makes an appearance, several actually throughout the book. We find out what’s happening with Beverley (more than the others, since she IS going to give birth to Peter’s twins), Abigail, Molly, Guleed, Seawoll, Agent Reynolds and Nightingale, but they are all there just to give Peter an assist.

So good that I’m no longer side-eyeing all those other things Ben Aaronovitch worked on last year instead of this book.

I went back to read some of the earlier books in the series and was struck by how much I enjoyed them. Peter's job begins as "to find the rat among the mice," meaning the SCC suspects corporate espionage but couldn't suss out the infiltrator, and the job ends with him breaking and entering in the middle of the night with two librarians in tow, and then getting fired when his cover is blown.Because pheromones, because beauty, because laughter and joy when she was near and loss and emptiness when she was gone. There were so many things I enjoyed about this installment, and those things brought back all the good feelings I had when I first started the series all those years ago. Then I would again state that I like them all, and very much enjoy listening to the first album also.

A bit of wrangling needed to happen and the full interesting import of later spoiler territory plot items comes to fruition nicely. This is a glimpse of what I would have liked to see in the event he and Martin Chorley go head-to-head, but of course that’s not a possibility anymore… or is it? Though he is supported by Nightingale, Guleed, and Silver, and we see more of the gentle domesticity of his life with Beverly and her growing "bulge", the true bulk of the story has nothing to do with the twins. The action is packed (I stayed up until 6am reading this because I couldn’t put it down) and Aaronovitch’s characters are as clever and interesting as always.

Peter briefly gets to look into the “eye” of something dark and malevolent when a portal opens up at the end of the book. Born and raised in London he says that he'll leave his home when they prise his city out of his cold dead fingers. Perhaps it was Lesley’s traumatic injuries and those months of possession by Mr Punch that warped her character from a rule-abiding policewoman into a criminal mastermind. Peter’s job begins as “to find the rat among the mice,” meaning the SCC suspects corporate espionage but couldn’t suss out the infiltrator, and the job ends with him breaking and entering in the middle of the night with two librarians in tow, and then getting fired when his cover is blown.