Partially due to my inability to come up with a
semi-coherent summary, but mostly due to my laziness, I have decided to use the
Goodreads summary for this review. There is a VERY good chance that I will
continue to do so in future reviews.
From Goodreads (and I suspect the jacket copy)
My name is Peter Grant, and I am a keeper of the secret flame -- whatever that is.
Truth be told, there's a lot I still don't know. My superior Nightingale, previously the last of England's wizardly governmental force, is trying to teach me proper schooling for a magician's apprentice. But even he doesn't have all the answers. Mostly I'm just a constable sworn to enforce the Queen’s Peace, with the occasional help from some unusual friends and a well-placed fire blast. With the new year, I have three main objectives, a) pass the detective exam so I can officially become a DC, b) work out what the hell my relationship with Lesley May, an old friend from the force and now fellow apprentice, is supposed to be, and most importantly, c) get through the year without destroying a major landmark.
Two out of three isn’t bad, right?
A mutilated body in Crawley means another murderer is on the loose. The prime suspect is one Robert Weil, who may either be a common serial killer or an associate of the twisted magician known as the Faceless Man -- a man whose previous encounters I've barely survived. I've also got a case about a town planner going under a tube train and another about a stolen grimoire.
But then I get word of something very odd happening in Elephant and Castle, on a housing estate designed by a nutter, built by charlatans, and inhabited by the truly desperate. If there's a connection to the Crawley case, I'll be entering some tricky waters of juristiction with the local river spirits. We have a prickly history, to say the least.
Just the typical day for a magician constable.
One of the things I find most interesting when it comes to
the books we read is, why we chose to read them. In this case, Broken Homes is
the fourth book in the Peter Grant series and I’m reading this because I read
and enjoyed the first three, but that doesn’t really explain the why.
I first came to this series when I came across Whispers
Under Ground while browsing the book section at Walmart. In general, the book
section of Walmart is not exactly known for its variety and unparalleled
selection, but in this case I discovered something new to me. The cover is what
initially caught my eye. I absolutely love the artwork on these books and when
I saw that the book series is basically (insert your favorite police
procedural) + MAGIC!!! I was sold. I bought it, read it, and loved it.
If you are at all familiar with this series, you are
wondering why on earth I started with the third book. The very simple answer to
your question is, because I didn’t realize it was a series until I had almost
finished reading. After I finished it, I gobbled down the first two books.
However, if I had come across the other books first, there is a very good
chance I never would have given them a second glance. Why? Because the cover
were ugly.
OK, so they aren’t that bad, but they are nowhere near as
visually appealing as the other covers and I am glad to say the first two books
have since been rereleased with pretty covers (I think the pretty covers might
have been the British covers originally). So anyways, I started with book
three, then read books one and two, and that brings me to the subject of this
review, book four, Broken Homes.
I am having some SERIOUSLY conflicted emotions on what to
say about this book. On one hand, it is a new Peter Grant story, I love this
series, and I really like Ben Aaronovitch’s writing. BUT, to be honest, I felt a little let down by this installment.
I feel like in previous books, Aaronovitch did a much better job of writing a
story, that while it was a piece of the greater story arc, each one was also a
complete story with a definite beginning, middle, and end of its own. I felt
this book introduced a whole bunch of potential plots, but didn’t really go
anywhere with most of them before it was introducing something else. Ninety
percent of the book felt like set up and then all of the sudden it’s the end of
the book, there is a MAJOR cliffhanger, and zero percent resolution to anything
that happened thus far.
When it comes to the writing, Aaronovitch continues to be as
entertaining as ever. Peter is
delightfully snarky, constantly peppering everything he says with geeky
observations that reveal how he isn’t quite as cool as he’d like to think. As
for the rest of the characters, they are wonderfully multi-dimensional in ways
that supporting characters don’t always get to be portrayed. One of the things
that I love most about this series is how matter of fact it is about the
diversity of all the characters. This is not a book with an entirely white or vaguely,
unidentifiably ethnic cast of characters. The character’s ethnicities are
important and relevant to the story, but in a seamlessly organic way that never
veers into tokenism.
While this series can be a bit of a mixed bag, overall I
feel it is worth a read if you are looking for a fun, humorous urban fantasy.
But please, learn from my mistakes and read it in the proper order.
