Book Review: London Falling by Paul Cornell
It’s New Year’s Eve, and Operation Goodfellow is about to end. The years spent infiltrating Rob Toshack’s organized crime network, the money spent, it’s all produced nothing they can use to pin a charge on the kingpin. So at midnight, the Metropolitan Police are pulling the plug. But they’re not the only ones facing a deadline. Rob Toshack is rushing around town trying to find something or possibly someone to keep his hold on power. And if undercover officer Costain can find out what it is Rob’s looking for, all his hard work might not go down the drain.
This is the first urban fantasy novel by Paul Cornell, who you may remember from some well-received episodes of Doctor Who or the Demon Knights series I reviewed back when. And the emphasis is on “urban.” The story is anchored to London as both a location and a concept, to the point that if any of the protagonists chose to leave London, they’d be perfectly safe from the weirdness at hand.
The first few chapters read like a gritty crime thriller, but take a turn into open weirdness when a captured suspect is exsanguinated without any visible wound or poison. Even then, the police assumption is that they’re up against a gang of assassins with a previously undiscovered method of killing. That is until Costain, his fellow undercover cop Sefton, Detective Inspector Quill, and police intelligence analyst Ross come into contact with an artifact that gives them all The Sight.
This is now both a curse and an edge, since they can now see and feel all the supernatural weirdness of London. Much of it is disturbing or outright hostile, which means sleep is far away. On the other hand, while the uncanny creatures that rule the shadows are powerful, they have long relied on the fact that they’re invisible to normal people. Once some of the police can see what’s really going on, their police procedures and methods make it much easier to proceed than if it was just some random private eye.
The primary opponent in this story is witch and serial killer Mora Losley, who has a connection to football (we Yanks call it soccer) legend. She’s straight out of the nastier fairy tales, cooking children in her cauldron. Mora’s very old and knows far more about London’s dark side than her police opponents, who are still trying to sort out what precisely the Sight is.
There’s a lot of British slang and police jargon, so the glossary of terms in the back will be helpful to readers not already familiar with the setting. Mr. Cornell got input from actual police officers, both uniformed and undercover, so the hardware and police techniques feel authentic.
Content issues: some rough language, apparent suicide, children in peril (and some nightmarish scenarios for parents), incidental racism, sexism and homophobia.
A couple of the twists felt telegraphed, particularly one that serves as a plot hook to set up the next few books in the series.
Overall, a high quality of writing, some suspenseful moments, and if I didn’t like some of the main characters, well, that would be because they’re not very nice people.
Recommended for the intersection of urban fantasy and crime thriller fans.
