Review: Broken Homes

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Broken Homes is the fourth instalment in Ben Aaronovitch's Peter Grant series mixing magic and today's police work, and while there's still a lot of policing going on, I didn't feel like the case (or a case) was the focus of the story. So many things happened...
The rivers had a party, which was a convenient way to introduce another one of them and bring Beverley back. Ordinary people did things without always knowing why, bringing the Faceless Man back into focus. Lesley started a thing with Zach, and Zach brought the quite people up for a pub crawl. Oh, and a late German architect did some pretty weird things... (Also, as always in English books, they didn't get all of the German right, but it was close.)

The pacing of the book wasn't so great, which is probably why I lost track of the story line inbetween. The humour was great as always, though, and I loved learning a bit more about what Nightingale can actually do, and what's going on (or was going on) with magic in other countries. There was also, once more, the introduction to a new character who will hopefully get a place with the other regulars, even though it's getting a bit crowded. I think everyone from before was included in Broken Homes, but sometimes only with pretty minor roles that could have been left out to leave more room for an overall story arc.

The cases mostly couldn't be solved in a satisfactory way, at least not for the public. I won't add spoilers here, so just assume that the Faceless Man was quite active in the background. He was also very active behind Peter's back, showing how convenient it can be to have a first person narrator sometimes. Ben Aaronovitch really dropped a bomb on us readers in the end, holy shit!

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