False Value by Ben Aaronovitch

Because of the way that Lies Sleeping ended, Peter Grant finds himself suspended, temporarily he hopes, from the London’s Metropolitan Police. Because expenses don’t stop just because a job does, he signs up to work in the security department of one of London’s biggest and flashiest IT start-ups, the Serious Cybernetics Corporation. The founder, an American tech billionaire who recently relocated to the UK, is clearly a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy but he either didn’t get that the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation failed at everything it tried to do, or he enjoyed courting disaster by naming his newest firm after Douglas Adams’ creation. At any rate, I grew up on Hitchhiker’s and still have most of the six hours of the first radio shows committed to memory, so I got a geeky kick out of all of the locations at Peter’s new job being named for odd bits from the older work. Security staff are the Vogons. Fortunately, Peter is not asked to produce any poetry, and security is more friendly than their namesake.

Another small set of details I enjoyed were the boardgames that the staff at Serious Cybernetics play on company time. Some of them were from way back — Metamorphosis Alpha gets mentioned on page 20 — and others were familiar names from more recent decades. The Hitchhiker’s references and the gaming go a ways to establish Serious Cybernetics as the kind of company that’s both old-school computing and cutting-edge tech, doing things so innovative and high-concept that nobody is entirely sure what they all are, or how they will make money in the end. Terrence Skinner, the visionary founder, likes it that way, and everyone else follows along. Except, to a certain extent, the head of security, Tyrel Johnson, an ex-policeman with a West Indies background. He has hired Peter to sniff out a rat that Johnson believes is nibbling away inside of Serious.

Then there is the matter of the top floor. Only certain people are allowed up there; nobody talks about what they are doing; and Skinner is very interested. It’s an ideal place for Johnson’s rat to be scuttling about, but Peter is not cleared for anything to do with that project. Naturally, he’s keen to find out more. He gets even more interested in when he spots a fae-adjacent person he knows from the London demi-monde trying to break into the secure area.

I was shocked at first to find Peter in the private sector. Aaronovitch has made him so convincing as a policeman, and as someone convinced he should be a good policeman, that it was hard to picture him in any other role. After the initial chapter at the start-up the next few are flashbacks that show other threads of the overall plot, and keep open the possibility that Peter’s suspension from the Met really means a major change in his life. The other threads involve such things as the theft of a set of instructions for a device that’s apparently right at the border of magic and machinery as discovered or devised by Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage, some unusual capabilities mustered by the New York Public Library, and how Peter reacts when he steps on the magical equivalent of an IED.

When Nightingale was training me he said that if you’re not dead in the first instance, then your chances of survival are much improved.
“By how much?” I’d asked.
“That depends,” said Nightingale.
“On what?”
“On what happens next,” he said. (p. 66)

It won’t be a surprise that Peter does not get blown to magical bits by the infernal device, just that it’s slightly less of a surprise that he has not severed connections with the Met after all, and that there are ulterior motives for his employment at Serious Cybernetics. Everyone, however, is in deeper than they expect, and the collision has the potential to upend quite a lot of the delicate magical balance that keeps London ticking along.

There are plenty of good bits along the way, too. Nightingale encounters a practitioner who, while an opponent, is very close to being his equal and may have surpassed him in some areas. Aaronovitch shows how he relishes the challenge and gives readers and idea of what he might have been like as a younger man. The relationship between the Folly and the rest of the police force continues its uneasy course:

Not to mention that, while senior officers in the regional forces have accepted the need for Falcon [magical] liaison, they try to make the structures as unofficial as possible. I think they’re hoping that if they don’t talk about Falcon, then Falcon will hardly ever happen. Ironically, this is known as magic thinking. (p. 249)

A further twist is that during a time of austerity thanks to top-level political decisions, the Folly has money, thanks to independent sources of funding that were established many decades ago.

The story’s momentum seldom flagged, but the series itself — now in its eighth book in the main sequence — is starting to sprawl a bit. There are not just Peter and Nightingale in the Folly, there is also Peter’s cousin Abigail, under Nightingale’s tutelage even though she is still school-age. There is the circle of high-powered lawyers who have also learned some magic from an illicit practitioner and who have been formally put under the Folly’s wing. There are ceremonies for the spirits of London’s rivers. New in False Value are the foster children of Peter’s supervisor at Serious Cybernetics; they’re not magically inclined, but Peter’s girlfriend, the goddess Beverly Brook, takes considerable interest in them, and I think they will be returning in future stories. Sometimes it’s nice to get a glimpse of what other characters are doing, but I think sometimes the book might have been better served by keeping them off-stage and letting readers figure out on their own what the characters had been up to in the meantime.

That didn’t stop me from reading the book in about a day and a half, and enjoying the heck out of it — true value.