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 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. ( )

Detective Inspector James Quill is about to complete the drugs bust of his career when his prize suspect Rob Toshack is murdered in custody. But nothing about Toshack’s murder is normal. Now, the team must find a suspect who can bend space and time and alter memory itself, a suspect who will murder again. And they begin to realize that London is not the city they thought it was, but instead, that it is the home to sinister magic. They have two choices: panic, or use their new abilities they barely understand. Together, they begin hunting a terrifying supernatural force the only way they know how: using police methods, equipment and tactics, but while learning the rules of this new game, and quickly. London Falling seems to be a story about what happens when police fall into the weird and have no real guidance about what they’ve gotten themselves into. There’s a lot of flailing about with little payoff. I DO appreciate how… well, honestly, this book is really dark. Really dark. But the aimless flailing really bothered me, and I ended up trudging through the end of it. ( )

London Falling is, as most urban fantasy books, rather dark. It has some quotes and references that make you grin, but it is quite brutal and graphic in its description of violence. There is no one explaining the supernatural to this already jaded cast, no guidance and they don’t know the rules of the game they are playing. I will not say more about how the fantasy elements work in this book, because there is no way to avoid spoilers. Just so much: Everything seems well thought out, and not off the rack.

London Falling has one flaw, and a pretty bad one for any book: A sluggish start. I already had several people tell me how frustrated they were with the beginning after looking forward to this book so much. The POV changes very fast, giving you no real opportunity to get a feeling for the characters at first. It is somewhat of a mess, that might have look good in a TV show before the title sequence, but a book needs to grab you more, conjure imagines in your head that you get automatically in TV or comic. For non native readers, the police slang doesn’t help and whoever made the Kindle edition added a glossary at the end, without mentioning it in the table of contends. A glossary does not help when you don’t know that it exists, dammit.

All that said; please go on through the first 30 to 50 pages. Please just continue, because this book is worth it. The cast is small, so even with the POV changes often, you still get a feeling for them soon enough. And if you have it they are brilliant. Cornell does POV all the way. You don’t know anything they don’t know, you get all their beliefs and misconceptions and worldviews, their hopes and fears. It makes them very real. Even if it make you want to shake them sometimes.

What adds to the pleasure of reading this is the diversity of the cast: white, POC, men, women, straight, queer, religious, atheist, quite, brash. You get everything, without it feeling forced. And Lisa Ross is possible going to be one of my favorite characters ever. And Cornell could have made her male. Without any problems. She is not sexy or the damsel or a love interest. But he didn’t. She is an amazing well rounded, fascinating character, brave and scared, stupid and brilliant, an equal among her colleagues. She is a person. And this should not be so notably but it is. ( )

Slow to start, the police jargon is distracting, it gets better after 70 pages, but I did not finish the book. ( )

A little slow at the beginning, but really excellent start to a series. Looking forward to reading the next one. ( )