Jennifer Vaughan, a female scientist inventing new ways to classify the residents of the Demi-monde (because the old ways just won’t do).

Abdul Haqq Walid (who, despite the clues from his name, is a Scotsman with red hair), and Dr. While Thomas Nightingale is a quintessential British mentor figure, who always wears suits and sometimes carries a cane, the forensic team for the Folly includes Dr. Have you joined the Den of Geek Book Club? You should!

The intersectionality of the character works beautifully to offer both an underrepresented viewpoint and a worldview that easily resonates with genre readers. Peter is also the kind of well-read SF lover to whom readers of SFF will immediately gravitate: from a jest about the nearly impenetrable (yet award-winning) The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro to an immediate recognition of runic tattoos as Tolkien’s dwarvish script (but the film version, not the original), it’s clear that Grant is the kind of reader and SF fan that his own readers will know and identify with. The identities of both his parents, and how his upbringing impacted his world-view, gives him an interesting lens through which he presents magical London. Peter, as African British, makes a unique narrator in urban fantasy mysteries. A diversity of characters…Īaronovitch starts out the series with a narrator from two ethnic traditions: his father is an Anglo-British jazz musician, and his mother is a Fula from Sierra Leone. In the second novel, as Peter investigates the deaths of jazz musicians, he first encounters the magical player who become a deep threat in the series: The Faceless Man, whose fae or demon minions are the causes of great violence, and whose terrorist attacks make him the most dangerous adversary of the Folly, the magical branch of the Met. Magic impacts Peter and his partner, PC Lesley May, as early as the first book-May, in working their first case in Midnight Riot, suffers a serious magical injury that haunts her through the rest of the series. Peter becomes deeply embroiled with the magical world-called the Demi-monde-interacting with fae, the gods and goddesses of London’s rivers, and other magic users, some of whom don’t have Nightingale’s scruples.įurther reading: The Best New Fantasy Books Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who is also the last officially registered wizard in England, takes Peter under his wing, both as a police officer and as a magical apprentice.

Rivers of london audio book