Reading: False Value

False Value is the eighth full-length novel in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London series. With one long-running plot arc having been wrapped up in the last book, this one feels like much more of a standalone. It sees Peter going undercover at a tech start-up, the Serious Cybernetics Corporation, to investigate a mysterious secret project kept in the restricted area of the building known as Bambleweeny. (I think Aaronovitch must have had great fun throwing in Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy references in the SCC, which is an entirely Hitch-Hiker themed company; staff are referred to as mice, the security team are Vogons, the executive lounge is Milliways...) Meanwhile, in his private life, his girlfriend (who is also the goddess of a South London river) is five months pregnant with twins.

This had a slightly different feel to the other books in the series, with a strong techno-thriller element and less of the fantasy demi-monde that we normally see, and the first section alternates chapters between Peter's present (January 2016 here, which honestly feels like another universe right now) and flashbacks to events of a month earlier in a way that means we keep being presented with consequences of events we haven't been told about yet, which I found slightly hard to keep track of, but I still liked it a lot; it was funny and clever and the plot was tense and complicated enough to be interesting but not too tense or complicated to follow in these stressful and exhausting times. As always in this series, there is a terrifically diverse cast of characters (and I do always love that in these books, whiteness is the skin colour that is marked), including a trans man (though a lot of people on Goodreads seem to have managed to misinterpret the scene where Peter intially clocks him as a masculine-presenting woman and switches to using the correct pronouns after being introduced as a proofreading error, sigh).