Review: Moon Over Soho

Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How to describe / review this book without either sounding demented or giving away the plot.

Our intrepid hero Peter Grant is a young English police detective constable of mixed-race heritage and the first apprentice wizard in 50 years. He works for a small, covert department (him and Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale) which investigates crimes with a supernatural origin.

In this, the second book of the series, young Peter is called upon to investigate after an otherwise healthy jazz musician drops dead from heart failure - the supernatural element being that his corpse had a strong vestigia of the dead man playing a saxophone solo. Vestigia are magical imprints, a bit like the spooky feeling you get sometimes walking into a strange house - the stronger the magic the object has been associated with, the stronger the imprint. Humans are bad at holding on to vestigia and therefore some pretty serious magic must have occurred for the corpse to be emitting such a strong imprint. A little digging reveals that relatively healthy jazz musicians have been dropping dead from suspected heart failure (which is a code for "we don't know, but his heart stopped") at a steady rate of two to three a year, shortly after playing a gig in the Greater London Area.

Peter's other case is a grisly one, involving a creature who bit off a part of the man's anatomy and allowed him to bleed to death (eww), as he traipses from jazz club to jazz club in Soho, he learns more about the reason there are so few wizards left in Britain and finds romance.

Peter's father is a famous trumpet player who never got his big break, consequently Peter knows a lot about jazz and jazz musicians. As he trawls the streets and areas of London, making his cynical and humorous asides about modern policing.

In a month of disappointing reads Ben Aaronovitch's first two novels have been shining beacons. Clever, funny, engaging, densely plotted and set in my beloved London. It's a treat to run through Soho with Peter, drive through the West End at rush hour and visit less famous areas such as Kentish Town to meet his parents. Someone described this as magic realism - not a term I had heard before - which perfectly sums up this series.

Highly recommended.

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