London Falling

Welcome to London where a gang had somehow consolidated the power and is ruling most of the town - without the usual battles and problems. And the police, despite managing to have two separate undercover policemen in the organization, has no idea how Rob Toshack is doing it - he seems to have enforcers that noone had seen or can track and everyone that opposes him seems to disappear. And DI James Quill is leading the operation that is trying to stop Toshack and his ways.

Cornell is writing an urban fantasy and knows it but his characters do not know that they are in one for the first 100 pages. So where a reader can see the supernatural, Quill and everyone else do not. So they try to make logical decisions and find logical explanations show more - in a world they do not understand. Until Toshack dies in front of Quill and something changes - and the 4 people that will make a new task force, start seeing the other London, the one under the regular one, the one that needs the Sight to be seen. And that world is terrifying. And the novel finally takes off.

Meet Mora Losley, a West Ham fan that has her power grounded in the city and that seems to be responsible for a lot of what is happening. If you know the history of West Ham's stadium and its original name, you will see her roots long before Cornell shows them or any of the 4 members of the team does. Not that it is important for the story itself - but it adds another layer of londonness to the story. But the more important thread is there - the football (soccer for Americans) connection. Urban legends start converging together and start turning to be true which would be scary enough even without the disappearing kids and forgetting parents. And in the middle of all of it is Mora - someone who time seems to have forgotten. And our 4 - Quill and Sefton, Costain and Ross - all have their own connections to the mess - some of them obvious, some not that much. And it becomes a race against time - to save a child, to save a footballer, to defeat the Witch of West Ham.

A lot of the story relies on surprises - things that the team does not know or cannot see for what they are getting revealed all the time and adding to the story. That would make the novel almost impossible to be read again with the same sense of horror and surprise - once you know it is happening, it fits and snaps in place and enhanced the picture. It is a trick that is not so easy to pull off - it is a thin line between hiding evidence from the reader and having it revealed in time without making it look like a cheat. And Cornell pulls it off magnificently - I never felt manipulated with the pacing or the information that gets revealed in specific times.

It is a dark story - with elements that turn your stomach but are part of the story. A lot of the deaths are grisly and even when no death is involved, details tend to stay on the dark side. But that is part of the charm of the story - even with the inevitable low points around the middle of the book, it is a well crafted story that introduces a darker version of our world (or London anyway). And the last pages, the epilogue, set the stage for a series that will need to aim very high if it wants to beat this story. show less

This is not your average American Urban Fantasy - twists of tropes for werewolves and vampires - spiced with will they / won't they romance and set-piece violence between the supernaturals, fast-healing combatants.

This is your gritty "You're nicked, my son" London Coppers going under cover to hunt vicious East London gangsters and then finding themselves up against something evil and inexplicable that kills children.

This is the Parental Advisory version of Urban Fantasy with up-close-and-personal gory violence, drug-use, rape, child murder and bad language throughout. The magic part comes not from distillations of Hollywood monsters but from London's own bloody history. fuelled by sacrifice and remembered fear-soaked pain and wielded by show more purely malevolent creatures who get off on the screams and despair of those they prey on.

When this book works, it works very well indeed. The tension is high, the plot twists make sense, the violence and evil are palpable and you really want the good guys - some of whom are not entirely good - to triumph. The London that Paul Cornell evokes smells and tastes like the real thing and becomes force n the novel rather than just a setting. The coppers are a diverse group of people, recognisably coppers but rising above stereotypes to become distinct individuals.

There are a couple of points where the book stumbles a little; an over-long investigation by the team into London's haunted hot spots and a step back in time to share the main monster's origin story that I felt was too mechanical and unemotional, providing an explanation of the monster without really getting in its head.

Still, although this is a stand-alone novel, "London Falling" is the first in a series, so some "Season 1, Episode 1" awkwardness is to be expected.

This was an original book, with a good plot and some interesting people that has added another I-want-to-know-what-happens series for me to read. show less

What starts as a normal police procedural soon turns into something else when DI Quill's prime suspect dies a very violent death while in police custody. With suggestions that there might be a mole at Gipsy Hill police station, DSI Lofthouse sets up a new four-person team, headed by Quill, to investigate what happened. Nothing in their wildest dreams could have prepared them for what they were going to find ...

If one didn't know that this was an urban fantasy novel, reading the first two and three-quarter chapters would make one think that this was an ordinary, seemingly authentic crime novel -- and then the action turns on a sixpence into something else. The author enjoys making use of madly inventive plot twists, always keeping the show more reader guessing by throwing surprises at them when they think they've finally worked out where the novel is heading; in that it's totally bonkers in a very British way. It's incredibly tense and shockingly brutal in places, with a few welcome moments of light relief. The major characters are flawed enough to be plausible, and I felt there was a real sense of team spirit emerging between them after a while. The ending neatly sets the scene for a sequel, and it will be interesting to see where this series is going. show less

This was great.

It's cops-discovering-the-unknown-beneath-the-world urban fantasy, but it's serious, gritty, colour-of-a-two-cent-piece coppers, and it's the Weird playing devilish hardball. It is genuine policework, and genuine terrifying. It's flawed, real characters rubbing up each other wrong and having to work together because that's what grown-up professionals do. It's adults being ground down by life and fighting back. It's soccer and the pub and bitching about your neighbours and London. It's great.

To get nitty-gritty: after a pretty full-on start (it's not so much slow as it's in the middle of a lot of stuff that's coming at you densely) it barrels along with verve and hit after hit. It's got a character core of four, and while show more one's the requisite white middle-aged male, one's a girl with the goods, and the other two are black and one is also gay (that's the mildest of spoilers, but I like the way it's revealed and handled in the book, so your call). Plus there's the Guvnor, who's a lady, and I lovelovelove Lady Guvnors. I look forward to seeing more of her in sequels.

Look, let's put it like this: there's a chapter-long backstory info-dump from a cat, and I don't even care. This book is that great. show less

Originally posted at www.csdaley.com

One of the things I have most loved in recent years is the absolute explosion of books getting published that experiment with mixing genre. London Falling at its heart is a police procedural. A good old fashion cop story where our heroes painstakingly work through the clues left behind to catch a serial killer. It is a giant part of the story. It's just that the serial killer may or may not be a supernatural being sacrificing children to fuel her hatred for the London leaders who wronged her.

The book is full of everything I love in a paranormal, urban fantasy, police procedural. We have ghosts, talking severed heads, and one fairly useless cat. It was like reading a John Constantine Hellblazer comic show more in novel form. The book was full of creepy. It was also full of flawed police officers doing their best to understand a world that has suddenly gone wrong. Throwing out what they know and trusting in their instincts to get them through the horror of what they don't know. I absolutely loved them and when the book ended I knew I would be back for more.

Cornell takes his time in this story and it works very well. The mystery unfolds a little at a time. We get to experience the weirdness right along with the heroes. Take our best guesses and watch where Cornell decides to lead us. The tension builds all the way through the story with the pace gradually increasing until the break neck and explosive finish. The world building was top notch. Giving us a London we both knew and didn't all in one go. If you're a fan of urban fantasy and police procedural than don't miss this one. I mean you can't go wrong with talking severed heads. show less

Just when you thought there was nothing new to be done with urban fantasy, Paul Cornell comes along with London Falling and mashes up the police procedural (i.e., a mystery solved by the police, using the tools at their disposal and confined in their scope by the law) with demons and British history. Until you read it, it’s hard to imagine a police officer giving the “right to silence” speech (the British version of the American Miranda warnings) to a creature who is doing her best dispose of him through magical means. But once Cornell gets to that point in his narrative, he has set everything up so well that it seems as natural as can be.

The novel starts as a straightforward police procedural. Costain is an officer who is working show more undercover for Rob Toshack, the current king of the London criminal classes, the first ever to have united all the bad guys in one organization. Toshack has conquered all his rivals and remained untouched by the law. It’s Costain’s job to get the information necessary to put Toshack away for good, along with his fellow undercover officer, Sefton. Their superior, Quill, is running out of patience, as he makes known to Costain in no uncertain terms in the first pages of the book. Quill wires Costain up with a recorder, which, he tells him, is his last chance to get the goods or the operation will be shut down.

The territory we traverse for the first two and a half chapters or so is entirely in police procedural country. The reader might be forgiven for thinking that she’s picked up the wrong book. But stick with it, because things start to get strange in Chapter Three. Toshack, upon being taken into custody, doesn’t behave the way a crime lord ought to behave. Soon, he doesn’t look the way a crime lord ought to look; in fact, he becomes sort of hard to see, even to the police officers in the same room he’s in. And then things get really weird.

The weirdness is inexplicable to the cops for some time. After all, whose mind would immediately jump to the occult as an explanation for a death, no matter how gory? Lofthouse, the top cop, says the toxicology folks are looking to see whether poison was involved, but no one’s ever seen anything like what happened in their own witness room. The team pulls in Ross, a computer and research guru, in the hopes that she can find something in the transcripts to explain the inexplicable, but she has no greater success than the toxicologists.

Lofthouse puts together a spin-off unit from the undercover squad that captured Toshack, comprised of Quinn, Costain, Sefton and Ross. It’s an uneasy work unit at first, and their assigned task — to find out what killed the victim — is not one any of them relishes. But it still isn’t until they consider the involvement of the West Ham Football Club, and the “urban myth” that anyone who scores a hat trick against them dies, that anyone gives the least thought to the paranormal rearing its head. Once they’ve opened the door to that possibility, though, more strangeness enters their lives and their investigation, until things start happening fast.

It’s exciting to watch this unit accept the possibility of magic infesting London when that very notion seems utterly absurd, just as absurd to them as you would find it absurd to walk into your job tomorrow and be told that you’re to function with magic because your computer is down. These are people who are entirely of the world in which we all reside together, until suddenly they discover that there’s more to the world than they had thought. And they’re also confronted with the notion that they still have to operate within the law, sorcery or no. How do you get a proper search warrant when the target of your investigation has a warren of homes connected by occult pathways? How do you solve a series of serial murders that dates back to the sixteenth century? What do you do when a cat — a dead cat that talks — is your best witness? This is CSI on steroids!

I have some quibbles with the book, such as Cornell’s tendency to shift the point of view from one character to another with alarming rapidity and no warning; one paragraph we’re seeing the world through Quill’s eyes, and the next we’re in Sefton’s brain. The characterization is drawn with broad strokes, so that Sefton is the atheist, Costain is the crooked one, and so on. It’s written rather cinematically, as one might expect from Paul Cornell, who was until now best known for his Dr. Who and other television scripts.

With a lesser plot, these annoyances might have marred my enjoyment of London Falling. But these really are just are quibbles because the story is so fascinating and the story moves so quickly, and is so smart, that it overwhelms my objections. As a result, I’m eager to read the next in the series, and to see what these characters do with their lives and their jobs now that they know there is magic in their world.

Originally published at http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/london-falling/ show less

Superb, very clever new entrant into the urban fantasy market with a unique angle seamlessly blending a mundane police procedural through the darker side of horror/early SF into a evolving journey of discovery and urban fantasy. This is the author's first UF novel, and he's clearly left enough set-up for a long running series, although I'm not sure subsequent books will be able to capture that transition realisation that there's something else out there, as enjoyably. It is a very tricky thing to master, and generally skipped by most in the UF genre who start from an a priori assumption that their special world exists. It's the big let-down in the better known Rivers of London series that none of the characters are ever than surprised show more by what they encounter. Paul Cornwell does much better, even if this is a lot darker in tone than the former.

James Quill is the lead Detective Inspector of a London Organised Crime squad - especially anti-gang work. He has finally managed to infiltrate two under-cover officers (Sefton and Costain) into the infamous West End Toshack gang. Despite all their reports nobody, even within the gang, seems to know how he's so successful. Rob Toshack seems to keep a force of freelancers to do most of his nasty work, separate from his main gang members. They know everything about him, from his favourite football team (West Ham) to his family history (partly through their data analyst Ross), but can't work out how things get done. A series of dramatic gestures by Rob touring his entourage around random London houses, finally results in his arrest and Quill has a real sense of achievement in managing to get Rob into an interview room. Rob gets as far as 'I confess' before his head explodes in gout of blood, and Quill is left looking for something he doesn't understand. And so the police go to work, travelling data, and looking for patterns, and eventually discover some very unexpected results. However no knowledge comes without sacrifice, and they each have their secrets to explore.

Very well written. The looming sense of dread and horror is superbly crafted through the middle half, without resorting to excessive gore. The characters have a believable police banter and yet sense of grim responsibility that you don't often encounter. The details on the 'magic' are sufficient without being overwhelming and such as they are revealed are not contradictory. The motivations of everybody are particularly well thought through. The only slight niggle was the introduction of Jessica at a point much later than it seemed should have occurred.

Very well done, I'm looking forward to the sequels. show less