The October Man (no real spoilers)

[sienamystic]

Just read through the new Rivers of London novella, featuring a new protagonist. I enjoyed it, but rushed through it too quickly and want to go back and reread. It's nice having an alternate view of the Folly and the timeline of magic history in general, and I wonder if he's going to set a story in France as well. (I know one of the shorts had a French character.)

I don't think it's fair to compare Tobias to Peter yet, as Peter's had multiple full novels to flesh out his character and Tobias has only had the one novella, so I'll say I'm interested in getting to know him a bit more. (And I like the fact that he asked his team to bring him snacks while he was waiting around at a job.) I do really like Vanessa, and I'm interested in the rivers that appear in the story.

Comments

[silversandbea]

Yeah, I read most of it while not mentally at my best, so I'll probably reread before actually putting my thoughts in it. I had a few issues trying to remember who was who, but generally enjoyed it.

I did enjoy how different the narrative voice was - not only in personality but in sentence structure. And I cracked up at some of the Grant and Nightingale references.

[sienamystic]

Nightingale really put the cat among the pigeons by training Peter, didn't he? It's funny to see that act, which looks so casual in the first book, have such far-reaching repercussions. I'd love to know more about what Nightingale was thinking when he started moving forward with actually getting Peter officially made an apprentice.

[silversandbea]

My guess is that Nightingale had no clue what an impact it would make - his general reaction to other practitioners seems to be to assume that they're all dead, and 'Nightingale was unaware of what was going on' always seems like a good bet. But yeah, the sheer amount of knowledge they seem to have about at least some of Peter and Nightingale's activities (I also loved Tobi being bewildered by Kelly's reaction when he asks her about how the English rivers handle it), compared to Nightingale's eternal shrug is pretty amazing (which isn't to say that there isn't anyone in the UK that knows about what's going on in Germany, just that they aren't sharing the information with the folly).