Broken Homes

Masking Betrayal

Broken Homes
by Ben Aaronovitch
Gollancz
ISBN: 9780575132481

Warning: A very big spoiler in this one so, if you are going to read this book at some point, I would suggest you read it before digging into this review.

Broken Homes is the fourth novel in the ever popular Rivers Of London series by Ben Aaronovitch and it’s yet another follow on from the original novel in that the lead villain from that story, who main protagonists Inspector Peter Grant, his friend Lesley (also an inspector) and their boss Nightingale, in the very small division of the metropolitan police dealing with magic… is once again the main antagonist here, known only as the mysterious ‘faceless man’.  People who have read the first will remember that, in that novel, the final battle with said bad guy caused Lesley’s face to fall off and, despite many attempts to undo this surgically in subsequent tomes, she still remains no further to getting her ‘beyond scarred’ mess of a visage fixed in any way, forcing her to also wear a mask when out and about.

This novel deals mainly with the area around Elephant and Castle and a specific tower block called the Skygarden, where Peter and Lesley eventually end up taking a flat, undercover, to try and figure out what’s going on. As it turns out, the building itself is the key to the nefarious plot of the faceless man and the various murders all lead back to having something to do with the periphery of this building.

And once again, it’s a wonderful blend of procedural detective work offset by the world of magic with absolutely loads of pop culture references and other clever things afoot. So a nice parody of Orwell’s Animal Farm can be found early on when Peter mentions (the novels are written from his point of view), “It’s a police mantra that all members of the public are guilty of something but some members are more guilty than others.” Another clever thing is, when recounting a battle with one of the Dr. Moreau-like beast/human hybrids from the end of the second novel, he mentions having gone ‘mano-a-mano-tiger’ with him.

And, as usual, the various references to other franchises and works of fiction come thick and fast… with nods to such things as Harry Potter, Game Of Thrones, classic era Battlestar Galactica, Ghostbusters, Doctor Who (Peter refrains from correcting a reference about the Autons for fear of looking too nerdy), Something Wicked This Way Comes, Lord Of The Rings (the Skygarden block is compared to Isengard), Monty Python and even a mention of actress Zhang Ziyi. Along with, I’m sure, many others I’m not nearly nerdy enough to have picked up on. Perhaps my favourite shout out is to Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? or, knowing Peter, the movie version called Blade Runner (reviewed here), with a lovely passage about various questions he is using to interrogate a suspect which reads “I called it the Voigt-Kampff test, even though only Dr. Walid got the joke - and he had to look it up on Wikipedia.”

Now though, I have to address the big, shocking moment from the end of the novel. Which, to be fair, I had seen coming since book one and have been waiting for it to happen but, it still took me by surprise to some degree and, funnily enough, because I’d given up on my idea of the true allegiances of one of the characters about halfway through this book because she really does help with the investigation… or so I thought. Here’s the thing… ever since the first novel (and I believe I mentioned it in my review of that one and possibly in the second book review also), I’ve assumed that Peter’s best friend Lesley will, due to her traumatic experiences in the first novel, switch sides and join with the enemy. It’s too much of a perfect character arc of betrayal to ignore in her, I thought. 

However, I’d just about given up on the idea by about three quarters of the way through this novel but then, right near the end of the book, boom, it played out just as I’d thought it would (although the nature of the betrayal was so casual and off handed that it took me by surprise). Peter has the faceless man handcuffed and in his custody when Lesley tasers him and runs off with the villain… who has presumably got it in his power to grow her face back somehow (or at least I suspect that’s what has been the promise). So at the end of the story we have a very bitter Peter Grant and the crew of The Folly, where the entirety of the magic division lives, is just Nightingale, Peter, Molly the bizarre house servant (who has a loose end set up in this story which is buried and, I suspect, which the author will come back to in another novel), a new acquisition of a Russian magic terrorist being temporarily held prisoner there and, of course, Toby the dog.

And that’s me done with Broken Homes, I think. I’ve taken advantage of Forbidden Planet’s recent restock of the series in signed editions so the next five novels in the series should be on the blog this year some time. As per usual, I can’t say enough good things about these books and they are something I’ve been heavily recommending to people.