Ben Aaronovitch · 2011 · thriller

Ben Aaronovitch's 2011 novel, published in America as Midnight Riot. A probationary constable takes a witness statement from a ghost in Covent Garden and is transferred to the Folly, the Metropolitan Police unit that handles magic - and finds himself brokering a peace between the god and goddess of the Thames while something makes Londoners tear each other apart.

1. 1
   Covent Garden

   A street performer finds William Skirmish decapitated in front of St Paul's, the Actors' Church, on a freezing January night - and PC Peter Grant, guarding the scene, takes a statement from an eyewitness who turns out to be dead.

2. 2
   Charing Cross

   The station where Peter and Lesley May have just finished probation, and where he is about to be assigned to the Case Progression Unit - which is to say the paperwork, which is to say the end of his career before it starts.

3. 3
   The Folly

   A five-storey Georgian house on the south side of Russell Square with SCIENTIA POTESTAS EST above the door - the official home of English magic since 1775, staffed by Thomas Nightingale and a maid called Molly with unusual teeth.

4. 4
   University College Hospital

   Dr Walid's mortuary, where the pathology of magic gets done properly - and where they establish that whatever is killing people leaves the same signature on the brain that too much practice leaves on a wizard's.

5. 5
   Wapping

   Mama Thames holds court in a tower block by the river, having walked into the Thames in 1957 as a Nigerian nursing student and come out as a goddess - and her daughters are named for the city's buried rivers.

6. 6
   Trewsbury Mead

   The source of the Thames in a Gloucestershire field, where Father Thames keeps to the upper river and refuses to come below Teddington - and Peter is sent to negotiate a peace between the two halves of one river.

7. 7
   Purley

   South of the river, and the pattern of the killings emerges: ordinary people snapping in public and doing appalling things, with the revenant of Henry Pyke riding them - and the face of Mr Punch behind it.

8. 8
   The Royal Opera House

   The climax, back where it began: a riot set off by opera-goers, Lesley's face destroyed, and the whole of Covent Garden coming apart in the way the city has been threatening to since page one.