Midnight Riot

I gave this a read because it was the only 2023 Hugo Best Series nominee I hadn't read any (or all) of, and my library hold finally came through. This is a magical cop urban fantasy. The main character talks to a ghost and gets sucked into being a magical cop apprentice and tracking down a mysterious string of murders.

In short, I think ultimately this is just not for me.

The characters all feel pretty flat and this is a plot-first rather than character-first book. The fact that the main character has too much lecherous male gaze going on is only exacerbated by two female characters who seem interested in him (somehow, why). If I wanted to be positive, I think it's got a lot of good plot threads to pick up in the future for other books, and I'd be interested to hear more details about the magic system.

Midnight Riot is what would happen if Harry Potter grew up and joined the fuzz.

This endorsement at the front of the book really didn't start me off on the right foot since I would really rather not have any mentions of terfy wizard lady in my life. (Also, excuse me, but he did join the fuzz.) If I had to describe it, this book feels more like Charles Stross' Atrocity Archives, but with cop bureaucracy instead of corporate.

I certainly would rather not have sympathetic cops in my fiction at all, but I am sometimes a sucker for mystery stories which often (but thankfully not always) intersect with cops. Things like Rose/House end up being more palatable as the police there are murder investigators primarily; the power dynamics are such that they could have been non-cop detectives and the story would not have changed.

What I think doesn't work for me here in Midnight Riot especially is that this is very police-y in a distasteful way with many """jokes""". There's jokes about cops being very good at lying and faking evidence. There's jokes about cops getting drunk all the time, especially mid day. There's a joke about not "intrud[ing] upon a traveler camp with anything less than a van full of bodies in riot gear--it’s considered disrespectful otherwise". What doesn't work here is that the story is largely sympathetic to both cops and the protagonist, and so jokes about violent and lying cops sound more like "haha my buddy slacks off at work" and less like "don't trust the fucking cops".

This is pure fun. It's got suspense, humor, and interesting characters. It's a police procedural, in which London's Metropolitan police includes a wizard for handling those awkward, hard-to-explain things. I also quite like that not everyone in the cast of characters is white and middle class.

Our plucky protagonist, Peter Grant, is a probationary constable in the Metropolitan Police in London. He's just reached the point in where you get promoted or end up in a backwater, and he's looking like he's headed for a backwater, when he sees a ghost. That wouldn't generally be a good thing, but when a senior member of the police asks him why he's loitering near where a murder took place the day before, he tells the truth and says that he's waiting to see if the ghost shows up again. Turns out that he was talking to the department's wizard, and he find himself assigned as the sole apprentice to the only wizard.

Part of the pleasure is the wicked satire of police bureaucracy, which is, of course, like any other sort and so you can happily identify as he pushes the shiv in.

BTW, this book is called "Rivers of London" in the British edition. There are two more books in the series, and they're good, too.