⭐⭐ 2/5 Stars – I was so close to DNFing this. I hated everything about the main plot, Peter gave me ick, and most of it was infuriating reading… BUT the subplot, the world building and the direction I think the series is going held my interest!
Format: Audio (BorrowBox)
Read: May 2025
I really didn’t like Peter in this one. He acts like a complete idiot for the entire book! I hated the plot with Simone from start, and I found the way the end was written infuriating! But.. as with book one, there was still enough entertainment to keep me going despite the flaws!
A spoilery rant about Simone, but I don’t think it’s that much of a spoiler because it’s fucking obvious from the minute she appears! [click the triangle/toggle to open]
Anyone who’s ever passed by a murder mystery will be highly suspicious of Simone as soon as she appears on the page. The woman was a walking red flag, but also on a purely professional level, it is hard to make any sense of the previously conscientious rule-following Peter immediately starting up a relationship with the girlfriend of his murder victim in an active case, and without a second thought and never any reflection. Not even when every clue he finds is a big red flashing arrow pointing at her and every time he follows a lead, she turns up outside!! Does he not think it’s weird as fuck that she wants to sleep with him mere days after her previous lover (whom she seduced away from and displaced his live-in girlfriend) died and she never mentions him?!
Plus, she’s essentially nothing but a sexy cartoon character of a buxom, Bohemian, posh girl and everything about her is for the Male Gaze, which is irritating. She has no personality (thoughts, feelings or motivation) beyond she’s a voluptuous body, a ridiculously high appetite for sex and food, in particular cream cakes, which again just seems meant to appeal to a fetish. Her thing for cream comes up multiple times.
She uses to the dated racial slur “jap” a surprising amount, “a savage” and even once “negro,” and Peter doesn’t bat an eyelid which I also found bizarre when in the same book he’s been educating Nightingale why using they should not use the term “black magic” because of its racial connotations. I assume this meant to be a clue (not that we needed more) that she’s older than she looks… By what’s the point of that when Peter ignores it and it’s never addressed?!
Even in the end, when he does piece things together, it’s told in a strange way where it’s not clear to me when he saw the truth… And he still never questioned whether she’d manipulated him with magic to feed on him (and maybe his Jazz musician father, who’d she’d already tried to seduce and feed off?!). I never felt that they had any real emotional connection; it was all just sex. They never had any interesting conversations!
We are apparently expected to care about saving Simone? Because Peter does, and because she and her sisters didn’t know what they were and their memories would conveniently fade… So it’s not their fault. Even though they’ve caused the deaths of hundreds of people and ruined lives. Like, how did they not work out they don’t age, and all their boyfriends die?! I just don’t understand what they were meant to be… because they sure were not three-dimensional people.
[end of rant]
It’s so unclear what is meant to be actually going with Peter in this whole book. To me it just read like he is a fucking idiot lead by his dick, and it felt out of character from book one that he’d be so incurious in the face of so many flashing red lights and really just does such bad police work! I disliked how much I heard about his erections in the first book, and in this one, I got even more of that with a lot of tedious sex scenes. Sex scenes are usually boring anyway, but this was extra dull because there is no build-up, no chemistry, no romance. I took to skipping through them because the whole thing annoyed me so much.
I think there was a way to tell this that I could have enjoyed, because at the root this plot was wanting to consider the different types of magical beings and their rights to life. If 90% of (or all) the sex was removed, if Simone acted like a human woman with depth instead of a cartoonist fantasy, if Peter had questioned his irrational attraction to her (the girlfriend of the victim in his active murder case!) and they’d got to know each other on an emotional level… It could have worked for me. If the point is meant to be that he is young and foolish, then fine, but he doesn’t reflect on anything in the end; in fact, the ending sentiment is that he did nothing wrong at all. Infuriating.
I honestly got so close to DNF’ing this… I only didn’t because I read a lot of reviews from people who felt the same as me, but promise this is a bit of a blip in the series.
This is a shame, it distracts from the significantly more interesting parts of the book! I loved getting more background on Hendon and the wizards, and the war. I enjoyed “The Irregulars” too! The black magician stuff was also very cool… I wish we’d spent more time with chimaeras and the creepy weird stuff in the secondary plot, rather than scene after scene after scene of Peter having sex and being bad at this job.
I also like the subplot developing with Leslie (I think I can see where this is going and I’m into it!), and I’m glad that Peter isn’t wallowing in guilt over what happened to her because it wasn’t his fault. I did dislike that it felt like he lost all previous romantic interest in her, now she doesn’t have a face… He fancied her in the first book (as well as Beverley Brook, who like Simone, was all sex appeal and so irritated me), now she has no face and he’s instantly off fucking the girlfriend of the victim in his active murder case.
This book is really a bad look for Peter. He really is edging over the line of giving me the ick at this point… But I read some reviews, and it seems like he gets better in the following books, so I will give him another chance. Especially because I want to know where things will lead with Lesley, I want to know more about the world and the underground magicians, and I still am dying for more Nightingale! There was not enough Nightingale in this one!
I’m not sure how Ben Aaronovitch pulled this off… I hated 50% of this book, but the other 50% was good enough to see me through to the end.
REVIEW SUMMARY
I LIKED
- More world building, going to Hendon and learning a little bit more about Nightingale’s past.
- Subplot with underground wizards is great with lots of creepy stuff!
- I love the direction the Lesley plot seems to be heading!
- The “Irregulars” were fun, and the stuff with Peter’s Dad was lovely too.
I DIDN’T LIKE
- Every single thing about how the main “jazz vampires” plot plays out.
- I found Peter incredibly frustrating, and he’s started to give me the ick.
- Everything about Simone and Peter.
- Even worse Male Gaze than book one with too many, very boring, sex scenes.
- Not enough Nightingale.
