London Falling

[sawyl]

As a sucker for the British line in urban fantasy that merges crime fighting — or spying, in Charlie Stross' case — with magic and horror, I thought it was about time I read Paul Cornell's supernatural police procedural London Falling.

With gangboss Robert Toshack in custody after a four year undercover operation, DI James Quill and his team finally think they're about to get some answers. But just as Toshack is about to fess up to everything, his head explodes in a way the medical examiner finds hard to explain. Cheated of their quarry, Quill, DS Tony Costain, DC Kev Sefton, and analyst Lisa Ross find themselves clearing up loose ends when they stumble across one hell of a lead that seems to indicate that Toshack was in league with a serial killer of the first order.

With this opening, Cornell establishes his core group of characters as solid and pretty standard members of the police. Quill has a reputation for being a copper of the old school, more thanks to his dear old dad's reputation for being a copper of the old school than anything else, a slightly wobbly marriage to a journalist, and a genuine affection for his team. Costain is a dodgy wide boy who has spent so long undercover, he's lost any sense of himself as a good person. Kev Sefton is quiet, thoughtful and sensitive about his roots growing up as black and posh in Kensington. Costain, having spent a great deal of time with Sefton undercover in Toshack's gang, largely loathes him. Ross, the only civilian in the group, is a talented analyst with her own reasons for wanting get closure on the Toshack case.

But everything changes when Quill, poking around more or less at random in the killer's house, happens to trigger a reaction that causes all four members of his team to suffer some sort of psychic change. At first each of them thinks they're having some sort of psychotic break, but when they pool their experiences they come to realise that they've actually developed the ability to see the mystical side of London and that their serial killer and Toshack's enforcer, Mora Losley, might just be the Witch of West Ham.

After the shift when the four develop the Sight, the rest of the book follows them as they try to come to grips with what it means and, without any assistance, try to establish the basic ground rules of what it means and what it allows them to do. Each of them has a different response, with quiet Kevin Sefton rising to the challenge and using his rational and questioning mind to map out the basic rules of their new reality. In a particularly comic scene Ross arranges for a rabbi, a chaplain, and an imam to explore operational mysticism and to bless various objects for them; needless to say the three clerics all take an enlightened view of their respective faiths, explaining everything in terms of metaphors to a group of people who seem able to concrete manifestations of the same things more or less everywhere they look.

Much of the tension of the book turns on the outcomes of West Ham's home games. Once Quill and company realise how Mora powers her abilities, and once they know that she is honour-bound to kill anyone who scores a hat trick against her team, each match becomes a race against time, both to get the member of away team out of London before they can be attacked and to recover those who Losley would sacrifice to get what she needs. Although the book covers some of the same territory as Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series, Cornell's London is edgier and more hostile, while his team lack Peter Grant's humour and wry narrative style which makes the genuine horrors at the heart of the Rivers books seem more bearable.

Highly recommended.