Ben Aaronovitch’s Foxglove Summer is the latest of his Rivers of London series. When I wrote up the first four, I compared them to Butcher’s Dresden Files books, and that comparison feels even more apt now.
This installment is something of a break from the building continuity of the series, as our detective protagonist goes off to the countryside and gets embroiled in a missing kid’s case; it’s presumably not a spoiler to say that the supernatural is involved, considering the genre.
As a standalone book, it’s fine enough, an enjoyable if slight… well, I was going to say “urban fantasy” but I guess it’s more accurately a rural fantasy. Anyway, it’s still well-written, still has realistic-feeling characters, still has many virtues. But as an installment in the overall series, it’s kind of an annoying intermission, because there are all sorts of major plot elements hanging around right now. I’d prefer for Aaronovitch to resolve those and then do some one-offs while ramping up the next big arc. (I’m implicitly hoping that the major plot elements that are hanging out there aren’t intended to be series-spanning things that only pay off over the course of twenty books or whatever, because that would be awful.)
Still, vague concerns over the long-term plotting of the series shouldn’t stop you from reading this series now. It’s really good stuff, and if you like Dresden—or like it conceptually but find Butcher’s tics too annoying to put up with—you should pick this up.
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