Adventures in the Mouse House

And I appear to have exceeded the allowed number of tags on LJ, so from now on I can only use ones I've used before.

30. Who Killed Sherlock Holmes by Paul Cornell

Regular readers will know that I have been eagerly awaiting this one. Paul Cornell's Shadow Police novels are my very favourite supernatural detective series, mainly because they are straight up horror in a police setting, and an exercise in what smart people do when presented with the supernatural.

In Cornell's London, whatever London remembers is real, so Sherlock Holmes is one of the ghosts of London. One of the detectives, Sefton, has a dream that Sherlock Holmes has been killed, rushes to the Holmes museum at 221B, and finds a body that only those who have the Sight can see.

This coincides (or not) with three separate Sherlock Holmes films/TV shows being shot in London, and grisly deaths of people who have ever played Sherlock Holmes, in ways that make increasingly less sense.

Meanwhile, the data analyst Ross is on a quest to recover her lifetime's happiness (which she had to sacrifice in the last book to buy a crucial clue - one of the singular darkest things I've ever read), and Lofthouse, the senior office who doesn't know why she knows about the Shadow Police, finds out more about her past and how she came to be involved in all this. These are easily the best parts of the book.

I loved every second of it. Still not as much as London Falling, but it will be extremely difficult to beat that.

21. The Severed Streets by Paul Cornell

The eagerly awaited (by me) sequel to London Falling. I finished it on Wednesday but wanted to think about some things before I wrote it up. Sadly my brain has been deader than a very dead thing, so I'm still not very articulate.

I'm still not sure how I feel about this. The main problem being that I came to the second book with expectations.

It didn't go where I thought it would - we still don't know a lot about the structure and nature of magical London.

Cornell shares my opinions on the Jack the Ripper murders and the hype. On the plus side, Paul Cornell has come to the same conclusion as me. On the down side, should I ever articulate such opinions, it'll just get written off as having stolen them from Paul.

I'm still not sure how I feel about his insertion of Neil Gaiman as a character, but I kind of like where he went with it.

And although we go in knowing that one way to gain insight is to "make sacrifice", the level of sacrifice here - well, it packs a punch. It's a Dresden-files level of having to give up too much to get the desired result. (Speaking of which, that's out tomorrow. Yay!)

Having said all that, yes it's a good ripping yarn. I was way over-thinking it.

68. London Falling by Paul Cornell

I was not convinced about this - I wasn't sure I needed more supernatural detective fiction set in London in my life, and the author is best known for writing Doctor Who, which I Do Not Do.

I didn't take to it straight away, either, finding it too police-procedural.

And then suddenly our detectives are in the creepy home of a serial killer, put their hands in a cauldron full of soil and can see things that other people can't. From there on in I couldn't put it down.

It is very police procedural, and at the same time genuinely creepy and scary. Unlike Rivers of London, where the protagonist sees something weird and is enfolded into the hierarchy that exists for dealing with the uncanny, the team here are having to make it up as they go along while pretending to find out everything by mundane means.

A lot of thought has gone into this, and there's some interesting complexity to it as well. Place is very important. There are two ways to gain power - to be "remembered", or to "make sacrifice". The detective who is most serious about making this whole magic thing work for them comes to realise that he is too complex to "be remembered" (he is black, and posh, and gay, a member of the Occupy movement AND a cop) so he has no choice but to "make sacrifice" and has to find a way to do this without becoming a monster.

Unlike the Rivers of London series which is mostly set in inner London, this book takes place mostly in Zones 3 to 5.

Can't recommend this highly enough. I pushed it on Jason on Saturday morning and haven't heard a word from him since. I eagerly await book two.