Even though this is the fourth volume in the Peter Grant series, I did read it first [due to my leaving volume one in my office in Coventry and coming across this one in an airport bookstore in Düsseldorf], an experiment I do not advise anyone to repeat as it kills some of the magic in Rivers of London [renamed Midnight Riots on the US market, for an incomprehensible reason!, with the series being recalled Rivers of London, but at least they left the genuine and perfect covers…, not like some of the other foreign editions!] and makes reading Broken homes an exercise in guessing. [Note for ‘Og’s readers suffering from Peter Grant fatigue: the next instalment, taking the seemingly compulsory trip Outside!—witness the Bartholomew series—, is waiting for me in Warwick, so I will not read it before the end of January!]
“I nodded sagely. `You’re right,’ I said. `We need a control.’
`Seriously?’she asked.
`Otherwise, how do you know the variable you’ve changed is the one having the effect?’ I said.”
Now, despite this inauspicious entry, I did enjoy Broken homes as much [almost!] as the other volumes in the series. It mostly takes place in a less familiar [for a French tourist like me] part of London, but remains nonetheless true to its spirit of depicting London as a living organism! There are mostly characters from the earlier novels, but the core of the story is an infamous housing estate built by a mad architect in Elephant and Castle, not that far from Waterloo [Station], but sounding almost like a suburb from Aaronovitch’s depiction! Actually, the author has added a google map for the novel locations on his blog, wish I had it at the time [kind of difficult to get in a plane!].
“Search as I might, nobody else was offering free [wifi] connections to the good people of Elephant and Castle.”
The plot itself is centred on this estate [not really a spoiler, is it?] and the end is outstanding in that it is nothing like one would expect. With or without reading the other volumes. I still had trouble understanding the grand scheme of the main villain, while I have now entirely forgotten about the reasons for the crime scene at the very beginning of Broken homes. Rereading the pages where the driver, Robert Weil, appears did not help. What was his part in the story?! Despite this [maybe entirely personal] gap, the story holds well together, somewhat cemented by the characters populating the estate, who are endowed with enough depth to make them truly part of the story, even when they last only a few pages [spoiler!]. And as usual style and grammar and humour are at their best!
Xi'an's Og 