Book review: The Severed Streets

The Severed Streets is Paul Cornell's second Shadow Police novel, his urban fantasy series about a small team of London police who've been gifted/cursed with a form of second sight that only works within the boundaries of London (or, it turns out, selected other cities around the world.) This installment has a backdrop of political unrest and riots, as a supernatural figure that seems to be emulating Jack the Ripper starts to wreak havoc, but twisting the Ripper's MO to actually only kill men. It's strong but very dark, which may be one reason it took me a while to get through - the political metaphor is clear and this is a very angry book that takes a lot of frustration out on its characters. Its bleak nature made it hard to pick up sometimes, especially when reading it at a time when the situation is even worse than the one a couple of years ago that Cornell is railing against.

The other very contentious issue with this particular book is a little in-joke that goes way too far. In a novel where a number of characters have very obvious real-life counterparts, it's a good gag to have a knowing reference to a famous fantasy author being part of London's supernatural subculture, and then turn round at the end of the paragraph and state outright that it's Neil Gaiman. To then have that cameo expand and just keep on getting bigger until Gaiman ends up having massive plot significance just feels really indulgent.

So it's a shame the one touch of levity is a smug one that takes you out of the story, but it's an interesting enough world that I probably won't be giving up on it just yet, although I hope the next book in the series features a bit more actual escapism in its fantasy.

Book review: Witches of Lychford

Paul Cornell's author bio mentions the many different media he's written (and won awards) for, including TV and a couple of the most popular episodes of the revived Doctor Who (but nothing for some years now.) It does make me wonder if Witches of Lychford wasn't originally envisaged as a book, because by its end it does feel like you've just watched the pilot for a supernatural TV show. It's not just the fact that it mostly establishes a setting and characters for further stories - and there is already another book in the series - but also the fact that it's so short. It basically has time to introduce its central mismatched trio - a witch, a vicar and an atheist-turned-occultist - and its location of Lychford, a village that's a weak spot between supernatural dimensions. The three women get to form an uneasy alliance and fight off their first challenge, the proposal of a supermarket whose building would destroy the occult protections against invasion from other realms. It's certainly mainly setup for "more adventures to come..." and it's, unsurprisingly, well-written with well-drawn characters, so I will look out for those further adventures, but much as I like a quick read I hope we get the chance for something a bit more intricate than a novella next time.

Book review: London Falling

Paul Cornell is another Doctor Who writer to launch a book series about a section of the Metropolitan Police dealing with the supernatural; presumably Ben Aaronovitch hasn't taken it as encroaching on his territory since he provides the cover quote. And London Falling suggests a different enough approach that it can happily enough coexist with the Rivers of London series - there's a bit of a darker, nastier edge to this book that's closer to the Mike Carey Felix Castor books that I still miss.

Here the team is a four-strong one that comes together largely by accident when a long-running undercover operation comes to an abrupt end, the crime boss they've spent years trying to take down dying suddenly in a supernatural (and very grisly) way. While investigating the death the head of the operation, two undercover officers and an intelligence analyst end up acquiring, for reasons they still haven't found out by the end of the first book, psychic powers that allow them to see into the supernatural underside of London.

It took me a while to get used to the way Cornell jumps between his four leads as point-of-view characters every couple of pages, but the story (featuring a curse on anyone who scores too many goals against West Ham) builds well, and kept me keen to go back to it. But it's probably the fact that Cornell manages at least two HUGE moments of pulling the rug out from under the reader that'll ensure me checking out the rest of the series.