Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovich

This month we met at my house to celebrate birthdays: Rachel's and our book group's!  Yes, we have been going for four years now!  Jen made a beautiful cake and while we all enjoyed it we discussed 'Rivers of London' by Ben Aaronovitch.

This book was a murder mystery/police/comedy/magic thing-a-mi-bob.  The main characters are two Met police officers who investigate magical mysteries, the style of writing is very relaxed, easy to read yet made us laugh out loud at points.  We loved the characters and the concept was very similar to the nursery rhyme mysteries by Jasper Fforde (who we also loved).  We did get a bit lost in the middle of the story where the action picked up and felt that the rivers plots was bolted onto the main murder mystery part, we preferred the murder bit anyway.

Concept: 9/10
Plot: 7/10
Characters: 9/10
Ending: 8/10
Cover: 8/10
Slap: no-one!

Overall Total: 8/10

We chose our next book from the following:

• Fifty Great Short Stories by Milton Crane
• Solaris by Lem Stanislaw
• The Life of an Unknown Man by Andrei Makine
• The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• The London Train by Tessa Hadley
• War Horse by Michael Morpurgo

We chose 'The London Train' by Tessa Hadley which we will be reading for the May meeting.

Our next meeting will be at 8pm at Bar Copa.

I know that we voted on our book of the year 2011-12 at the last meeting but I've lost the bit of paper, can anyone remember who won?  I promise to be more organised soon :-)