Jul 7

Jul 7 Review: Stone & Sky by Ben Aaronovitch

Rivers of London #10

Longtime followers will know that I am fully invested in the RoL universe. I’ve been reading these books for years, and the audio versions are still my go-to if I need something familiar and mellifluous in my ears (Kobna 🥰). I’m not super familiar with London itself, only small sections of it, but I enjoy location spotting when I can.

So when I discovered via Ben’s social media field trips a year or two ago that this next instalment of the series would be set in and around Aberdeen - a city where I lived for eight years, studied, made friends for life, bought my first home, met my husband - it was as if all my storybook Santas had arrived at once.

There’s a nervousness when beloveds converge, a bit like a party when friends from different parts of your life are all in the same room and you suddenly realise how different they are, and just have to hope they’ll get along rather than start throwing crudités at one another. I shouldn’t have worried re Stone & Sky; Ben’s hands are the absolute safest. Not only did he bring these worlds together gracefully, he also pulled in threads from a separate but contemporaneous one: fans of Stuart MacBride’s Logan McRae books will spot several easter eggs.

The loose plot device that has brought them all (Peter, Beverley, the extended family, Nightingale, Walid, Abigail, Zach, the band - I really meant all) up to the north east of Scotland is a reported sighting of an unlikely big cat. The resultant search expedition has evolved into a wholesale summer holiday trip. While tents are pitched and camper vans are anchored in the garden of a convenient friend, the book begins to alternate narrative between Peter and Abigail.

Abigail is on the trail of the big cat, aided by a fox pal, and swiftly finds herself meeting far more than she bargained for. Peter is almost immediately pulled in to a murder investigation as a result of something smelling a bit fishy. The two narratives weave in and out of one another, the convergence building the ongoing new order of the Folly, while the separations showcase Abigail’s now-adult status and her growing independence.

I absolutely adored location spotting in this book, as I could attach personal experience to so many of them. Dyce! Westhill! The Lemon Tree! Brig o Balgownie! Every new chapter title landed a fully-formed picture in my mind, and I knew many streets described even without them being explicitly named. I held a mental list as the book went on of places I thought might make an appearance and there weren’t many I missed - though no-one would have bet against Rubislaw Quarry featuring, creepy fecker that it is. Can’t tell me there’s not weird stuff living down there.

The magical end of things stayed on the right side of fantasy for me (eg more realism than magical); even when the creatures got stranger, the goings-on remained reassuringly human. The guilty party and unravelling of the mystery needs another listen for me to be sure I got it all, though that’s almost definitely on me rather than the book. I’m easily distracted.

I will have a tiny quibble about the accuracy of the local accents as represented in the audiobook - Aberdonian and its many localised variants are tricky to get right. I certainly couldn’t do it having lived there for years, so no shade, but it will likely feature in critique from more local readers. The voices are rendered as ‘recognisably not-central-belt Scots’ which will do me.

I really loved seeing Abigail growing into herself. Her grief, her magical abilities, the interactions with Peter and the others, and her new relationships too. She feels like a fully rounded character now, with loads of scope for more to come. Zach, on the other hand, appears early on and once later as a useful tool, but otherwise is mostly absent. Looking forward to the novella that tells us what shenanigans he got up to in the interim.

The oil industry looms large in this one, because it’s Aberdeen so of course it does. From research to the installations (“it’s a platform, not a rig”), I found plenty of detail to add a tangible aroma of fossil fuels to proceedings. I’ve never much thought about the inner workings of a drill, and I think I learned more than I’ll ever need to know here. The final action / crisis scene was suitably anxiety-inducing, with real sense of peril because Aaronovitch has zero qualms re breaking his readers’ hearts.

I’m sure the next book will be set back in London, but I hope we’ve not seen the last of some of these new Scottish characters. Given the expansive and retentive nature of the RoLiverse, I’m quietly confident. In the meantime, I’ll be here re-listening to discover everything I missed the first time round.

And I promise, Aberdeen is a really lovely place to live.

In summer.