The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch

The Furthest Station by Ben Aaronovitch --- 136 pages including an Interview with Ben Aaronovitch

A novella that fits between Foxglove Summer and The Hanging Tree in Aaronovitch's wonderful Rivers of London series combining fantasy, mystery and police procedural.

It's hardly surprising that a city of great antiquity like London would have more than its share of ghosts. Some of them even ride the Underground; but rarely do they interact with mortal commuters. So when the police start getting reports about aggressive specters confronting passengers on the Metropolitan Line, the authorities summon PC Peter Grant and his supervisor, Inspector Nightingale, of the Specialised Assessment Unit aka The Folly. With the assistance of Peter’s teenage cousin Abigail (spending the summer as an intern at The Folly to keep her out of trouble) and Jaget Kumar of the British Transport Police, they take to the trains hunting ghosts to try and get to the bottom of this mystery.

The problem though, is that their witnesses' memories of these encounters fade away within minutes. And the ghosts themselves, if they can be tracked down and confronted, disintegrate on the spot. But with sheer dogged persistence, eventually Peter pieces together enough clues to hypothesize what could be causing this behavior. And soon they have confirmation. A young woman has disappeared. If Perter's theory is right, her life is in imminent danger. If Peter is right, only he and Nightingale have the necessary skills to find and rescue her before it's too late.

Another suspenseful and comic adventure in urban fantasy.

Click HERE to read the review from Publisher's Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Locus Magazine.

Click HERE to read the review from the Sci-Fi and Fantasy Reviews blog/

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

Unseen Academicals: A Novel of Discworld by Terry Pratchett --- 416 pages

This is the 37th novel in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, and was the first one published after he announced that he had been diagnosed with a variety of Alzheimer's that impairs visual recognition and short term memory but leaves the sufferer all too aware of the slow, insidious decline of his mental abilities. 

That said, this is one of Pratchett's most brilliant efforts in a long-running series that very few authors can match. Pratchett's comic genius has been compared to P.G. Wodehouse and this is a story that Wodehouse would have loved.

The Patrician of Ankh-Morpork has decided it's time to regularize the until now completely unregulated game of football, and the Shove that surrounds the matches. To do this he involves the wizards at Unseen University, whom are inveigled into fielding a team to challenge the footballers of the city --- use of magic strictly forbidden on the field. Let's just say this is the "War and Peace" of football combined with a Romeo and Juliet motif, a Dwarf fashionista, and the rehabilitation of one of fantasy's most iconic villians.

A British television network that has created three previous made-for-TV films of three Discworld novels is making a film of this one too. I have all the books and the DVDs in my personal library. There are few writers who do really intelligent fantasy and even fewer who can do really intelligent comic fantasy. I'm happy to say that Pratchett continues to write and has published several novels subsequent to this one.  Long may he fight the good fight!

Click HERE to read Terry Pratchett's comments on how the story came together.

Click HERE to read a fan discuss both the book and how Pratchett is coping with his disability.

Broekn Homes by Ben Aaronovitch

Broken Homes: A Rivers of London Novel by Ben Aaronvitch --- 324 pages

The fourth book is Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series of urban fantasy/police procedurals is another winner.

London Police Constable Peter Grant and his mentor, Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, officially constitute the London Metropolitan Police Specialist Crime Unit aka The Folly. Established by Sir Issac Newton himself, the Folly was the home of the Newtonian School of British Wizardry in the service of King and Country for four centuries, until a cataclysmic World War II battle against Nazi magic decimated the ranks. Nightingale, the sole survivor, carried on alone in the belief that magic was dying out of the world anyway.

Until with the new century magic is making a comeback, and there is at least one renegade practitioner of magic --- the "Faceless Man" --- with no allegiance to anyone but himself on the loose in London. And so Nightingale acquires his first apprentice in the person of Peter Grant, a very 21st century kind of police officer with an attitude towards authority and a demonstrable talent for magic.

Peter and Nightingale are working their way through a list of potential suspects when they are called on an otherwise routine traffic accident that leads them to a faceless corpse. In quick succession, a Southwark Council employee throws himself under a train, a breakin at a National Trust property is tied to the heist of a classic text of German magic, and the suspected burglar is discovered roasted from the inside out. And all these events seem to be linked to the proposed demolition of one of the last of the postwar Council high rise housing projects (designed by a mad German architect with possible ulterior motives) in the Elephant and Castle neighborhood of South London.

The cusotmary showdown at the end gets a twist that will shock and surprise series admirers, but it's clear that Broken Homes will not be the last of PC Grant's adventures, and that is reason enough to rejoice. A great new series, irreverent, intelligent, scathingly funny. Aaronovitch stands ready to inherit the crown from Terry Pratchett for comic fantasy at its finest.

Click HERE to check out Ben Aaronovitch's web site.

Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch

Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovitch --- 288 pages

This is the second volume in Aaronovitch's urban fantasy series, The Rivers of London, featuring London police constable (and wizard in training) Peter Grant and his mentor, Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, head of the London Metropolitan Police Special Crimes Unit that deals with the strange and inexplicable.

Peter is assigned to investigate the strange and inexplicable death of Cyrus Wilkins, an accountant and part-time drummer, who dropped dead of a heart attack for no apparent reason in the middle of a gig at a Soho jazz club. The first thing Peter notices when he examines the corpse is the music he hears surrounding the body: the great jazz classic, "Body and Soul." That's called vestigia, and it's a big flashing neon alert that Cyrus' death was supernaturally induced.

At about the same time, Peter and Nightingale become aware of strange creatures half-human, half-beast, preying on visitors to the clubs and bars of Soho. With the help of Ash Thames, one of the minor gods of the London Rivers, and a beautiful groupie named Simone who keeps turning up in the vicinity of murdered jazz musicians, Peter and Nightingale begin to close in on a renegade wizard, an "ethically challenged" practioner of the magical arts.    Great fun for fans of urban fantasy and the paranormal.

Side Jobs by Jim Butcher

Jim Butcher

 Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher --- 418 pages

Published in 2010, this collection of eleven short stories and novellas span the Dresden timeline from just before Storm Front to just after Changes, displaying Harry's trademark humor, personal demons and quixotic honor. One of the best writers of urban fantasy around, Butcher packs nonstop action into every sentence, and a lot of monsters going boom in the night as Harry & Friends defend Chicago from the forces of evil. 

Cold Days: A Novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

Cold Days: A Novel of the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher --- 515 pages

Harry is back from the dead, courtesy of the Winter Queen, in the fifteenth installment in the best-selling urban fantasy series. But the price of his resurrection is that Harry's agreed to place his mortal soul in thrall by assuming the mantle of Mab's Knight. Mab's last Knight came to a very sticky (and well-deserved) end at Harry's hands. Bargaining with the Sidhe is always a gamble as Harry knows well but hey! His options were limited.

Now he's trying to prevent an Outsider invasion and the End of the World as We Know It, but first he needs to figure out who is behind this plot to blow open the Well on Devilreach Island. Is it Mab, or her daughter Maeve? Since Mab has commanded Harry to eliminate Maeve, and Maeve is demanding that Harry eradicate Mab, and both of them insist that the other is the instigator of Doomsday, Harry's got to decide pretty quickly which one to believe. And with the Wild Hunt  breathing down his neck, he only has one slim chance of getting it right.

Jim Butcher, a resident of Independence MO, writes a fast, furious and entertaining story with a bite to it. If you enjoy fantasy with an attitude, I highly recommend the Dresden Files series.