Review: Midnight Riot aka Rivers of London / by Ben Aaronovitch

Well, I'm done Midnight Riot now.  I'd rate this book 7 out of 10.

The Pros:
1) The magic system is really interesting.  I love it, actually.  In some ways, its typical Urban Fantasy (magic is or is affected by the echoes of life laid down in patterns in the landscape) and in some ways, its creative and evocative (especially the forma and the descriptions of how magic is done).
2) It's setting and culture are vividly represented - which I love in a book.  This canon is replete with references to pop culture and contemporary technology familiar to the Harry Potter generation as well as British culture, the city of London, and general Britspeak.  It makes the setting really come alive.
3) It's got a good genre plot (urban fantasy).  This includes good backstory with Nightingale too.  I don't want to give too much away.

The Cons:
1) It requires a very high familiarity with British language and culture.  You'd have to know a lot more slang, references, and background knowledge about Britain and London than Harry Potter, Discworld, Doctor Who, and Sherlock all rolled together.  Seriously, you have to be a genuine Brit or ardent Anglophile to not have to stumble bewildered through the many, many, many passing references, pop culture allusions, and vague descriptions to Britain.  I am a serious Anglophile who genuinely loves stories that bring the setting to life... but this is something else.  Ode to Britain... fine, but it's taken to a point where it detracts from the story because...
2) ... this story really, really needed to focus its description instead on everything that you can't just see from the window of a London taxi.  In Urban Fantasy, real is boring.  We know about it already.  Give me the magic!  I think this story was trying to straddle the line between hard-boiled detective novel and enchanting urban fantasy and even though I love both genres, I feel like this one went too far into hard-boiled territory to also be as captivating as urban fantasy needs to be.
3) It often describes conversations rather than showing them.  That's a big pet peeve of mine.  If you're going to tell me that the MC asked a question and the other person answered it by saying no one knows, why not just have two lines of dialogue instead of two sentences of description.

Note: I've now read 2, 3, and 4 in the series too and am happy to report that all of the cons I listed above are better in subsequent stories.  For the series as a whole, I'd give an 8.5 out of 10.