Moon over Soho

chapter 1

Body and Soul

It s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind. If you drive northeast up the A12 you eventually come to Colchester, Britain s first Roman capital and the first city to be burned down by that redheaded chavette from Norfolk known as Boudicca. I knew all this because I d been reading the Annals of Tacitus as part of my Latin training. He s surprisingly sympathetic to the revolting Brits and scathing about the unpreparedness of the Roman generals who thought more of what was agreeable than expedient. The classically educated chinless wonders who run the British army obviously took this admonition to heart because Col?chester is now the home of their toughest soldiers the parachute regiment. Having spent many a Saturday night as a probationary PC wrestling squaddie in Leicester Square, I made sure I stayed on the main road and bypassed the city altogether.

Beyond Colchester I turned south and, with the help of the GPS on my phone, got myself onto the B1029 heading down the wedged-shaped bit of dry ground jammed between the River Colne and Flag Creek. At the end of the road lay Brightlingsea lining the coast, so Leslie had always told me, like a collection of rubbish stranded at the high-water mark. Actually I didn t think it was that bad. It had been raining in London but after Colchester I d driven into clear blue skies and the sun lit up the rows of well-kept Victorian terraces that ran down to the sea.

Chez May was easy to spot, a 1970s brick-built fake Edwardian cottage that had been carriage-lamped and pebble-dashed within an inch of its life. The front door was flanked on one side by a hanging basket full of blue flowers and on the other by the house number inscribed on a ceramic plate in the shape of a sailing yacht. I paused and checked the garden; there were gnomes loitering near the ornamental birdbath. I took a breath and rang the doorbell.

There was an

Ben Aaronovitch was born in London in 1964 and had the kind of dull routine childhood that drives a man to drink or to science fiction. He is a screenwriter, with early notable success on BBC television's legendary Doctor Who, for which he wrote some episodes now widely regarded as classics, and which even he is quite fond of. He has also penned several groundbreaking TV tie-in novels. After a decade of such work, he decided it was time to show the world what he could really do and embarked on his first serious original novel. The result is Midnight Riot, the debut adventure of Peter Grant, followed by Moon Over Soho.

A terrific follow-up to [Aaronovitch s] novel Midnight Riot, the debut of Peter Grant and his own weird London. Grant continues to learn the ropes of magical London, a process that takes him on a trip through Nightingale's haunted past and into some of the most interesting places you won't find on any official tour. Aaronovitch makes the story sing, building momentum until the ending is literally breathless.   --SF Revu

A realistic modern-day police procedural populated by increasingly solid characters and written in the same consistently witty style as the first Peter Grant novel [Midnight Riot]. . . . One of the most entertaining books I ve read in a long time.   --Fantasy Literature