Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London #2)

by Ben Aaronovitch

It was one of those tragic relationships: I’m a junior policeman, she’s the goddess of a suburban river in South London—it was never going to work out.

“There’s more to life than just London,” said Nightingale. “People keep saying that,” I said. “But I’ve never actually seen any proof.”

OXFORD IS a strange place. As you go through the outskirts it could be any city in Britain, the same Edwardian suburban build, fading into Victorian, with the occasional mistake from the 1950s, and then you cross the Magdalen Bridge and suddenly you’re in the biggest concentration of late-medieval architecture this side of the eighteenth century.

For a terrifying moment I thought he was going to hug me, but fortunately we both remembered we were English just in time. Still, it was a close call.

“I was trying to do my duty as a sworn constable under the Human Rights Act,” I said. “To wit, the right to life under article two, which mandates that any use of force must be absolutely necessary and that any poor bastard we kill had better have it coming good and proper.”