Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London #3)

by Ben Aaronovitch

something older, that instinct we all inherit from the evolutionary gap between coming out of the trees and inventing the big stick. From when we were just a bunch of skinny bipedal apes in a world full of apex predators. Back when we were lunch on legs. The warning that tells you that something is watching you.

Seawoll dropped the mangled paper clip back into a little Perspex box, where it served, presumably, as an awful warning to the rest of the stationery.

It’s just like TV. You turn on your siren and stick the spinner on the roof of your car so that the average driver knows to get the fuck out of the way. What they don’t show is that the spinner keeps falling off the roof and usually ends up dangling by its wire from the passenger window, and that there’s always someone on the road in front of you who thinks the rules apply to someone else. A sheet of glass, a pile of empty boxes, an inexplicable fruit stall—I wish.

“You’re so boring,” she said. “You’d think a copper who was a wizard would be more interesting. Harry Potter wasn’t this boring. I bet Gandalf could drink you under the table.”

I found a shelf of statuettes—my old friend goddess-surprised-by-a-sculptor.

You burn down one central London tourist attraction, I thought, and they never let you forget it.