Moon Over Soho / Ben Aaronovitch (Peter Grant #2)

4 out of 5 stars

London constable and apprentice Peter Grant suspects sorcery when Soho area musicians drop dead, their brain scans showing magical draining. Victim Cyrus left girlfriend Simone, who beds Peter. His dad "Lord Grant" taught him jazz, but master mage DCI Nightingale still recuperates, and a Pale Lady bites off essential bits for an animal chimera slave ring.


I do like Peter Grant! I find him a charming narrator, as he attempts to balance being a copper and being an apprentice wizard. Both roles are complex and the combination can be overwhelming at times.

I do love his insistence on quantifying and measuring his abilities, his attempts to understand magic using the scientific method, and his various ways of trying to protect his mobile phone from being fried by magic. I was also amused by his use of online translation tools to try to deal with Latin texts, because I do the same thing as a library cataloguer—typing titles, tables of contents, and occasionally whole paragraphs into Google translate, trying to determine which call number and subject headings to assign to a book that I can’t really read. You do get the kind of scrambled translation that Grant has to deal with! (Because those translation tools are largely based on United Nations documents, published in multiple languages and used as a basis for the translation, they are not always useful for personal and emotional subject matter).

I also love the setting—London itself is very much a character in these novels and it is clear that the author loves the city a great deal.

I will definitely continue to follow the adventures of Peter Grant.