Midnight Riot / Ben Aaronovitch

Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch. 298 p.

Peter Grant is a probationary police officer in London. Now that he's finished his 2 years of training, he'll be assigned to a division. He's pretty sure he's going to get stuck in the boring paperwork-oriented end of things, but then he interviews a witness to a bizarre murder--and it turns out his witness is a ghost. So instead he gets assigned to be the apprentice of a cop named Thomas Nightingale, who's also the last wizard left in England, and learn magic. Unfortunately, learning magic takes a long time, but the bizarre murders aren't waiting for Peter to get up to speed. Plus he has to figure out how to negotiate a truce between the factions of the spirits of each of the rivers of London.

I liked this book a lot. Peter's a fun and snarky narrator. He's often criticized by other cops for losing focus, but he wonders about the same stuff that I'm wondering about as I read. Plus, London itself is very much a character; Aaronovitch provides great sense of place throughout the book. I look forward to more books in this series, and will be ordering the second book (Moon Over Soho) ASAP.

Unfortunately, this book suffers from an ugly trend in American publishing: "whitewashing" the cover art. Peter Grant describes himself as mixed race--white father, African mother. You can't tell that by the cover because the image is just a silhouette. However, the original cover art looked like this. It's not as bad as having a white cover model represent a character of color, but it's still obnoxious.

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