Moon Over Soho (Rivers of London #2)

by Ben Aaronovitch

“We often investigate cases where the circumstances surrounding the death are unclear,” I said. Actually we, that is the police, don’t investigate unless foul play is bleeding obvious or if the Home Office has recently issued a directive insisting that we prioritize whatever the crime du jour was for the duration of the current news cycle.

“You have to get the foundations of the art right or everything you build on top will be crooked, not to mention unstable. There are no shortcuts in wizardry, Peter. If there were, everyone would be doing it.”

Never record anything you wouldn’t want turning up on YouTube is my motto.

I’d been expecting something Gothic but this was more like a Regency terrace that had escaped to the countryside and had shot out in all directions before some cruel architect could round it up and pen it back into its original narrow frontage.

Snakehips Johnson giving the tune such a danceable swing that Coleman Hawkins had to invent an entire new branch of jazz just to get it out of his head.

In a major inquiry a person who comes to the attention of the police as part of that inquiry is listed on HOLMES as a nominal. Any task that an investigating officer decides needs doing is called an action. Actions are prioritized and put on a list and officers are assigned to carry them out. Actions lead to more nominals and more actions and the whole investigation quickly becomes a whirling vortex of information from which there seems no escape. HOLMES lets you do word searches and comparison tests, but half the time that just leads to more actions and more nominals and more items of information. Deal with this for any length of time and you start to get nostalgic for the good old days when you just found a suspect you thought looked a bit tasty and beat out a confession with a phone book.