Whispers Underground

I'm re-reading the series. I particularly enjoyed the introduction to Abigail.I read a book about whats under the city of London[b:London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets 10783451 London Under The Secret History Beneath the Streets Peter Ackroyd https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1520511181l/10783451.SX50.jpg 15695572] (non-fiction) so I had heard about the fake buildings to allow smoke to get out of the tube when it used steam trains.As someone who grew up in the middle of Wisconsin, I laughed with Agent Reynolds when Peter expressed concern about her ability to travel in the snow. I think the terrible storm amounted to 3-4 inches which would have been an ordinary winter Tuesday where I grew up.

I enjoyed the first book, a bit rough in places, but Aaronovitch is really hitting his stride with this one. I originally wondered about Peter's parallels with Harry Dresden - detective/police procedurals, urban magic, a smart-talking main character, locations existing as magic personified, both being a love letter to the city in which they are set. But I like the direction of these stories and they are definitely not derivative. Peter's story is a very human one, I love how the author weaves commentary in and out of the narrative, and I love the way it reminds me of time I spent in London, albeit too brief.

When I first read this, I thought it was the best of the series so far; and I still think it's the best of the series so far: in my subjective opinion, none of the sequels has surpassed it.

In most of these stories, the bad guy is magically overendowed in some way, which I find tiresome and unnecessary. As if to prove that it's unnecessary, in this story the murderer is hardly magical at all, but it's a good story nevertheless. It's also quite funny in places, and there's less mayhem than in most of the other stories.

I wouldn't call the story a total delight all the way through, which is why I haven't yet given it five stars; but overall I'm well pleased with it. It introduces new characters, including Special Agent Kimberley Reynolds of the FBI and Jaget Kumar of the British Transport Police; Reynolds has to cope with being out of the USA for the first time, and both of them have to cope with encountering magic and other “weird shit”. Kumar remains useful in later books; Reynolds not so much—I think she works best in this one.

The blurb here on Goodreads grossly misdescribes Reynolds. In the story, her Christianity is barely mentioned (blink and you'll miss it), and her beauty is never mentioned at all. She's introduced merely as a thin white woman, and I think this description is never much expanded later. If Peter Grant finds a woman attractive, he normally mentions it, but he doesn't react to her at all, although they gradually become cautiously friendly.

Neither she nor Kumar are of major importance to the story: they're medium-level characters, whose reactions to what's going on provide some entertainment.

13-year-old Abigail Kamara made a brief appearance in the middle of the previous book. She gets a bit more time on stage at the beginning and end of this one, and is clearly being set up as a regular character, although she's not yet involved in the plot.

Another superb book in the series, in which PC Grant is seconded to a murder investigation team after a killing on the London Underground. It expands further on the world, and brings in a number of new characters, some of which seem to be being set up for novels further on in the series. Lesley also has a bigger role to play than she did in the previous book, now beginning to cope rather better with her new life.

The murder is arguably secondary to the worldbuilding, but the latter is notable for being strong on the ‘urban' part of urban fantasy, being very much grounded in the real world. The writing remains top-notch, with a self-deprecating style and what certainly feels like a plausible portrayal of police work. Even if our central character has a few spells up his sleeve, he's still a London policeman, and the story is to a large extent a procedural with the magic - here showing hints of a wider world than we'd seen previously - just forming part of the backdrop.

Executive Summary: Another solid entry in this series, and I hope to get to the next book much sooner than I got to this one.

Audiobook: Kobna Holdbrook-Smith once again does an excellent job, making this series a must listen for me.

Full Review
You may not know it from looking at my Goodreads shelf, but I was never much of a fantasy reader growing up. That changed in college. For several years after college, I didn't read much, but what I read tended to be Urban Fantasy. I just couldn't seem to get enough. My favorite is The Dresden Files.

Well at some point apparently I had enough. Every Urban Fantasy series I tried just didn't hold up to the later Dresden Files books, and I was no longer willing to give a series several books to hold my interest. I had pretty much given up on Urban Fantasy when I picked this series up.

I meant to read this book much sooner than I did, but other books kept coming up. Finally last month I had some extra time due to a road trip and I was looking for something fun/light to pass the time. This was the perfect book for that.

Urban Fantasy is littered with detectives/mysteries and this one is no different, but somehow Mr. Aaronvovitch does enough that I just don't care. I really like the characters, and I like the approach to magic. I want to know more about the world and the deeper mysteries of the Faceless Man that have been set up.

The main story of this book was fine, but not fantastic. It took a little while for things to get going, but the last 25% or so was all downhill. I would have liked it if we got more of the overarching plot. Dresden Files took a long time to set up it's larger story arcs, and I think that is much to its detriment. This feels much more like the TV episode format (continuing plot at beginning and end with the meat of it being mostly unrelated/stand alone). I hope we get more developments in the next book.

Peter and his partner are fun to follow around. The supporting cast was fine, but not super memorable. I liked the addition of the FBI agent (whose name I've already forgotten because I can't remember names ever). I don't know how they'd work her into a recurring role considering this is set in London, but I do hope this isn't the last we see of her.

This was a great road trip book, and I may pick up the next book when I hit the road again in December.

★★★1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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Okay . . . man, how to sum this one up. Peter, Lesley and Abigail Kamara (a teen-aged neighbor of Peter's parents) go down into the tunnels of the Underground to look for ghosts, and find one. What we learn here will be important come The Furthest Station. This is a fun little foray into the wider supernatural world of this series.

And then we get back to police work – a man is stabbed at the Baker Street tube and there's enough for Stephanopoulis to bring in Peter just to rule out magic. Which he can't do. It turns out that the victim is an American, which makes everything unnecessarily complicated. And then it turns out that he's the son of a US Senator, and things get worse. The FBI sends an agent – Kimberly Reynolds – over to help out/observe/get in the way. So Peter has to handle to non-normal side of the investigation, keep Seawoll from having to hear about magic (because it interferes with actual police work in his mind), and not let Reynolds know that there's anything not run-of-the-mill about Peter and the investigation. All at the same time.

Very quickly, it seems clear that there's something going on that Peter and the rest just don't get. Yeah, magic was involved in the killing, but there's no real trace of it in the victim's life – not with him, his school, his friends, his enemies, or anything. So where's that come into play? The answer comes when it's least expected and in a direction that was impossible to predict.

Aaronovich really pulled a rabbit out of his hat this time. Sure, he made both the rabbit and the hat, so it's to be expected that he'd do that. But, there's just something about the way he did this one – police procedural that accidentally turns up the answers and leads to something bigger than anyone expected. A great balance of UF and Procedural (the last one was a bit too light on the procedural for me).

Guleed doesn't get enough to do, but I liked her presence. Lesley really gets to shine a bit here, and her inability to be a regular part of the police force is underlined here for her and Peter – and just how horrible that is emphasized throughout. When Stephanopoulis is the rational, supportive authority figure for Peter (other than Nightingale), you know that Seawoll is a little over the top in his antagonism to all things Folly. But mostly, this was about characters we know and like getting to do things to keep us liking them, and probably liking them more while introducing some new figures for us to enjoy.

Really, the main take away I had from this audio production was a bit of joy over the fact that Holdbrook-Smith isn't perfect. His Agent Reynolds was just bad. At least the American accent part of it. I enjoyed his flubbing of that more than I should have. Meanwhile, everything else he did was just fantastic – especially Lesley. The range of emotion, sarcasm, etc. that he can put into her voice while still accounting for her lack of face is just incredible. Also, Zach Palmer – the roommate of the murder victim – was just hilarious. I know a lot of that was in the text, but the way Holdbrook-Smith brought him to life was wonderful.

As impressed as I was with the way that Aaronvich did everything he did, something about this one didn't work for me as much as others in the series do (either in this re-read or originally). I'm not sure why. Still, this was a good, entertaining book that anyone who likes the concept of a Police Officer/Wizard in training should enjoy.

There is a lot that might considered a part of “quintessential London.” There are the bridges, and the old buildings like the Tower of London and Westminster Abbey. There are more modern landmarks, such as the London Eye and Big Ben. And then there are the museums, such as the Tate Modern and Natural History Museum. But this is not, of course, the end-all and be-all of London. London, like many cities, is more than just the sum of its tourist landmarks. It's about it's residents, it's culture, it's history. And when a city is as old as London, and has as rich a culture as London, then it's easy to see that it's quite special.

Like many writers before him (and likely many after him), Ben Aaranovitch knows how special London is - special enough that he's used it as the primary setting for his Peter Grant series. Cities tend to accumulate their own stories, their own mythologies, and it is these stories that Aaronovitch uses for the worlding of his series. Beginning in Rivers of London, the series tells the story of Peter Grant, a police officer who becomes a wizard - or a wizard's apprentice, at any rate. In the first book, he gets roped into the wizarding business when he has to not only solve a string of mysterious murders, but also mediate between the warring spirits of the Thames and its tributaries. In Rivers of London he comes to accept his role as a wizard apprentice, and begins laying the foundations for his interaction as a man born and educated in the manner of the twenty-first century learning something far older and far more esoteric than anything he's encountered before.

In the second book, Moon Over Soho, Grant is once more brought in on a mysterious case connected to several jazz artists falling dead, which then leads to an even deadlier enemy: a group of wizards whom he and Nightingale call “the Little Crocodiles,” after the club they were a part of at Oxford. These particular wizards don't have the same scruples as Nightingale and Grant, and appear to be ready to wreak havoc over all of London without any concern for the people who get caught in the middle. Their worst atrocity is what Grant calls Dr. Moreau's Strip Club, where the main attractions are people who have been magically melded with animals. The Faceless Man, whom they have pinpointed as the leader of the Little Crocodiles, is still at large, and they need to flush him out of hiding.

And that's still what they're trying to do, for the most part, in Whispers Under Ground. This time around, though, they have help from Peter's friend, Lesley May, who nearly died in the first book when she pretty much lost her face - and nearly her life - and was revealed to be capable of magic spells at the end of Moon Over Soho. It's Christmas season in London, and in the midst of the mad rush to buy presents and prepare for the holidays, a dead body that turns out to be the son of an American senator is found in the railway underneath Baker Street - yes, that Baker Street - and there's something highly irregular about it. This leads to Peter and Lesley being brought in, and this in turn leads to a madcap and very frightening adventure in the mysterious underground of London - an underground that contains a secret not even Nightingale was aware existed.

Whispers Under Ground being the third book in a series, it's hard to expect it to stand on its own. There's a lot of references to events that have happened in Rivers of London and in Moon Over Soho which play into the events of the novel itself - not least of them being Peter's association with the Rivers: a class of spirits called genii locorum who represent the Thames itself and its tributaries, and who were central to the events of the first novel. There are also a small handful of minor characters who carry over from the first two: Dr. Walid, for instance, who acts as the primary doctor and medical examiner for the Folly (a term used to describe the branch of police Nightingale, Peter, and now Lesley work for - it's also their main residence). Other characters include Sahra Guleed, otherwise known as the “Muslim ninja” from Moon Over Soho, who pops up regularly when Peter and Lesley work with the main police force. And then there's Jaget Kumar, who works with the British Transport Police and is very familiar with the network of tunnels that make up London's underground.

For the most part, there's really nothing new to be had in this novel, especially when compared to the previous two. A pattern for the plot has already been established, and while it's still pretty well-written in the sense that there were a few unexpected twists and turns, but since the second book it's become clear that the pattern goes something like this: Peter has something bigger on his plate, usually linked to the broader state of the supernatural world, and something which cuts across all the books. A crime - usually a murder - occurs, and Peter is called in because there's something funky about it. As he attempts to solve the murder he finds out that it's linked to that broader issue he's been pursuing, and solving the case brings him one step closer to finding an answer to the bigger question he's been trying to figure out. In the meantime, a small array of supporting characters is either built upon or introduced, and they will surely be involved, in some greater or lesser degree in future novels.

Now, there is nothing wrong with these novels having a pattern - this is to be expected, as the Peter Grant series are primarily mysteries operating in an urban fantasy world, and mysteries all have one base pattern on which the author creates their own variation. What is more important is that the pattern works, and in Whispers Under Ground, it most certainly does. What distinguishes this novel - and indeed, the rest of the Peter Grant books - from the many, many others like is the world Aaronovitch has built around them: his version of London. And that is where, I think, most of the magic lies.

In this novel the reader is plunged into the dark, mysterious underground of London, which almost seems to be a world separate from the above-ground London where Peter has done most of his work up until this point. But the underground is just as much a part of London as the above-ground, perhaps even more so, because this is where a lot of the things London wants to forget eventually - or inevitably - wind up. And this time around, the novel introduces something that, I think, is one of the most brilliant attempts to include a notable standby of fantasy in an urban fantasy setting.

In the novel The Time Machine, H.G. Wells proposes the concept of a race of humanoids living underground. Called the Morlocks, they are extremely intelligent and extremely vicious, farming the helpless, beautiful, and stupid Eloi on the surface as a source of food. And this idea of a super-intelligent subterranean race makes an appearance in this novel in the form of the Quiet People. To compare them to the Morlocks, however, would be highly inaccurate, for they are a peaceful folk, similar to the Morlocks only in their inability to tolerate bright light, loud sound, and for their extreme intelligence - and their extreme creativity. They are also magical, capable of making unbreakable pottery. Although Peter initially compares them to the Morlocks, he later associates them more with the Dwarves from The Lord of the Rings, primarily because of their subterranean living conditions and their magical craftsmanship. I found them as a group very intriguing, and appropriate: there's got to be something down in the underground, after all, and it might as well be the Quiet People. It makes sense that they would be there, and I hope to see more of them eventually.

And now that I mention The Lord of the Rings, this novel is chock-full of references to it, and other things besides, including a conversation wherein Dungeons and Dragons gaming mechanics are referenced. Most notable, however, would be the references to Avatar: The Last Airbender, which had me thoroughly tickled - particularly since Peter kept referring to a particular character as an “Earthbender.” Having just come off the first season of Avatar: The Legend of Korra, seeing that reference back to the original series simply made me giggle over and over again. It also says a lot about Peter, Lesley, and Kumar that they use these references in the first place: they are obviously very much up-to-date with current trends in pop culture - even to the point of being sufficiently conversant in the terminology of what might be considered a children's cartoon.

As for the characters themselves, some change significantly, and a handful don't. Peter and Nightingale are the same as they were since the second book - this is hardly a surprise, particularly in Nightingale's case, since he's not around for a huge portion of the novel. The one who changes the most, however, is Lesley. Given the events of the previous two books, and the fact that she's now a part of the Folly (albeit unofficially), she's had a lot to get used to. She is, however, the perfect counterbalance to Peter's somewhat erratic nature without getting in the way of Peter being Peter, and even better, she manages to stand very well on her own. Jaget Kumar is very amusing and interesting, and I look forward to seeing more of him in the next few books. Sahra Guleed, as well, as intriguing, and she seems to work well enough with Peter and Lesley that I'd like to see more of her and her dynamic with them.

The most uncomfortable fit in this web of characters definitely has to be Kimberley Reynolds, the FBI agent. I suppose it's because she's American, and this being told from Peter's point of view she would most definitely the one person out in all of this, but I wish she had been utilized more effectively. She seemed like a very interesting character, not least because she sees Peter and Nightingale work magic and doesn't appear to go bonkers. Maybe she will come back at some later date, and I do hope she gets the better end of the characterization deal if and when that does happen.

Overall, Whispers Under Ground is a very fun third installment to what's already proven to be a very fun series. The cliffhanger is very, very promising (and rather painful, though in a good way), and I'm crossing my fingers for some more action from the Rivers in the next book - especially given the specific nature of the cliffhanger ending and the rather large (in comparison to Moon Over Soho) involvement of the Rivers this time around. The plot is starting to get predictable, but that is easily forgiven, given the world, some of the twists, and all the pop culture references that pop up all over the place. Peter's humor is as it should be - dry and witty - and there are more characters for the reader to know and maybe love. Once again, I find myself anticipating the fourth novel and the series - and here's to hoping it will continue to be just as fun as this one and the last two.