Lies Sleeping

I just finished Lies Sleeping after reading the entire series straight through, so this review is about the series as much as about the ultimate entry in it.

Wow! I've been immersed in the marvelous world Aaronovitch created for us, and it's a shock coming back. His world lives right next door to ours, changed just a bit so that magic is in use next to cell phones and deities walk and work amongst the “normal” folk. His descriptions of London and its surrounds are amazingly rich. The slang and British references are occasionally mysterious to this American reader, but I got enough from context to push right on.

I think Lies Sleeping might be intended as the last book in the series because it wrapped up pretty much all of the plot threads that have been building from Rivers of London to Lies Sleeping. If that's the case, I'll miss Peter and the rest of the characters. I can hope that Aaronovitch will give us more in the future, though. I will certainly be watching to see what he does next!

#LiesSleeping #NetGalley

This has remained a consistently entertaining series for me. I love how real Peter Grant and many of the other characters feel for me, as well as the realistic blending of police procedural with the magic and fantasy element. I also like the way that Grant is the narrator but he's not the most powerful and important character. The author has left him plenty of room to grow. The tidbits about London architecture and history are a nice bonus.

This one in particular was a bit distracting for me because of some repetitive scenes. Not once, but three times Grant is involved in major action scenes in combat with Chorley. It starts to feel like filler after two in my opinion. It is also a bit anticlimactic that Nightingale wasn't involved in Chorley's death. Unless of course he's not really dead. Always a possibility in this type of series.I also found Grant's kidnapping to be pointless. It introduces Foxglove, but otherwise took up a lot of time that I assumed was going to have a payoff in the overall plot. So far it didn't but again, this is a series so maybe the reason for it will be coming down the line.

That is unusual for this series though. Despite the ongoing Faceless Man/Leslie May thread, most of the time a story completely wraps up in each book. That's one of things I like about this series.