alobear | Two Sides of the Thames

This week, I read two books that feature the River Thames, but are very different in both genre and style.

Moon Over Soho is the second book in the Peter Grant series by Ben Aaronovitch. Peter is a police constable in London, who is apprenticed to the only remaining police wizard, and introduced to a world of the supernatural in the city. He meets the personifications of various tributaries of the Thames in the first book. They are less important in this volume, but he still ends up driving a stolen ambulance into the river to save one of them. I listen to this series in audio version, and I love the narrator's voice - Kobna Holdbrook-Smith imbues Peter with a great deal of character, and definitely adds to the experience of the book. I like the world, the characters, and the presentation of magic within the modern police force. Peter's irreverent attitude is fun, particularly in his interactions with his boss, Inspector Nightingale, and the stories so far have been pacy and enjoyable. I like where it looks like the series is heading, based on the very end of this book, because it seems like Peter's friend and fellow police officer, Lesley, will have a bigger part to play and I like her a lot.

My other river book was Tideline by Penny Hancock, which is a very unsettling psychological thriller about a woman in her forties, who ties a fifteen-year-old boy up in her house on the river because he reminds her of a boy she was once in love with as a teenager. It's mostly told from Sonia's point of view (first person, present tense), which adds a lot to the atmosphere, because the narrative really gets inside her head and does a good job of demonstrating her delusions and obsessions. The other point of view is the boy's aunt, Helen, and I found the switch to third person, past tense a bit jarring because it covers the same timeline. I also couldn't see what effect it was supposed to produce. There's also a thread set in the past, gradually revealing Sonia's history with the manipulative and abusive Seb when she was thirteen, and the story gets more and more disturbing as we find out more about her past. The river plays a big part in Sonia's story, and is almost a character in its own right in the book - it certainly made me think twice about wanting to live there! After what was essentially a whole book's worth of slow build-up, the ending felt quite abrupt and a bit inconclusive - I would have preferred more information about the aftermath, and how it affected both families. But it was very well written and involving, and a very interesting character study of a troubled mind.