Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

Format: Audio (BorrowBox)
Read: April 2025

Rivers of London is a book I’ve picked up and considered in bookshops countless times over the years. It’s always on the Fantasy table display in Waterstones, the cover always catches my eye, and I always wondered if I’d like it. Then I saw it was available in BorrowBox the other week, and I decided that now was my chance to find out!

I seem to be in a real Crime mood recently! I actually was listening to this at the same time I was reading A Man With One of Those Faces, and they make kind of a nice pair. Both lean into humour along with the action, though The Rivers of London is less so. Plus, the main character Peter, is actually a police officer and more competent than most of the characters in A Man!

Rivers of London is also, obviously, a fantasy book. It has wizards, ghosts, Gods and magic in it! It has characters doing magic, which I loved. I do get fed up with books that promise it and never deliver! Police Constable Peter Grant finds out quite quickly in the novel that he can talk to ghosts when a witness to a murder turns out to have died in the 18th century! This leads to him being recruited to the Supernatural crimes division as an apprentice to actual wizard Thomas Nightingale, and so begins his instruction alongside an investigation into what force is driving Londoners mad with rage… and causing their faces to fall off. There is also some tension to resolve between the factions of Mother and Father Thames and the various spirits of the rivers.

It’s a simple and entertaining read. The pace is quick, I didn’t find it dragged at all, and it’s laced with British humour. The main character is a police officer, and it is told from his point of view, so the style is to the point and fairly brief; he is reporting on events without loads of exposition, and I appreciated that. I also enjoyed the level of detail on police procedure, and how boring it is and how many officers there are behind the scenes doing the boring database searches and investigating from their desks! The mundanity of that made a fun contrast to all the magic stuff!

Peter is also mixed-race, which adds an interesting element to the books, since so often the protagonists of this kind of thing are middle-class detectives and white.

The aspects I didn’t like are how strong the male gaze is from Peter’s point of view… I don’t enjoy being told about his erections. There isn’t any sex in this book but there are still at least 3 references to his hard dick because of how sexy female characters are, but at least two of them are magical so you could argue it’s meant to be a part of their effect, but it still made me pull a face every time.

I’m definitely going to read more! The narrator, Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, was excellent too, and so I already have the second one borrowed on audio. I’m hoping to learn more about Nightingale and Molly in future books!