So here we are with Mr Aaronovitch again, described in a review of his blog as his first novel. Obviously genre spinoffery doesn't count, or didn't reach the Americas.
It's a police procedural with magic. Peter Grant, a wet behind the ears copper turns out to have an aptitude for magic, and is apprenticed to the dapper (and perhaps immortal) Chief Inspector Nightingale, apparently the only wizard in London, certainly the only one working for the Met.
It's a nice book. Apparently sold, with sequels, for a prodigious sum, and rather crying out to be televised. Nightingale is somewhere between Morse and Chretomanci, Grant is pleasently stroppy and charasmatic. If there's not an adaptation sometime in the next few years I shall be surprised. Hopefully not brought to us by the sale people that made Demons.
I started reading this thinking it was an attempt to be an English version of Jim Butcher's Dresden series. And perhaps that came into the pitch, but it lacks the grime of Dresden. It's far more gentlemanly and... British.
It's not the most demanding of books, but entirely readable.
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