Foxglove Summer

978-0575132504Preceded byBroken Homes
(2013) Followed byThe Hanging Tree
(2016) 

Foxglove Summer is the fifth novel in the Peter Grant series by English author Ben Aaronovitch, published in 2014 by Gollancz.^[1]

Plot

The protagonist Peter Grant is left shaken by the developments at the end of the previous book, the sudden betrayal and defection by a highly valued colleague to whom Grant also had a strong emotional tie. The moping Grant welcomes the chance to leave the familiar grounds of London and travel to rural Herefordshire, where the disappearance of two eleven-year old girls is a media sensation, the focus of an intensive police search - and might have grave magical implications as well.

Grant finds that the tangle of marital and extra-marital relations in a small rural community is not only a matter for gossip, but bears very serious criminal implications, and some supernatural ones as well. He meets with a retired wizard, traumatized by the secret magical battles of World War II, and with the wizard's granddaughter who has a very special affinity with bees. Grant gets into intensive contact with Beverley Brook, the goddess or Genius loci of Beverley Brook, a tributary of the Thames - and learns by personal experience just how rivers gain such gods. He finds that unicorns are all too real and that their horns are deadly weapons; that fairies do exist and even in the 21st century they do sometimes kidnap human children and replace them with changelings; and he meets with a real-life faerie queen, very different from the one imagined by Spenser.

As the ultimate result of all that, Grant faces the prospect of being stuck forever as a captive in the real-life fairyland - an alternative reality or Otherworld where Britain is still covered with a massive unbroken primeval forest, with no sign of the familiar towns and villages. Grant's single, slender hope of escape lies in the lasting magical (or possibly anti-magical) effect of the Roman Empire's engineering projects and of the Romans' habit of imposing themselves on the landscape and building "roads straight as an arrow" wherever they ruled.^[2]

Characters

Returning characters

• Police Constable Peter Grant; an officer in the Metropolitan Police and the first official apprentice wizard in sixty years.
• Lesley May; formerly Police Constable in the Metropolitan Police and de facto apprentice to Nightingale; now criminal associate of the faceless man and subject to an internal investigation
• Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale; head of the Folly and the last officially sanctioned English Wizard.
• Molly; The Folly's domestic helper, of unknown species.
• Dr Abdul Haqq Walid; world-renowned gastroenterologist and cryptopathologist.
• Beverley Brook; goddess of a small suburban river and consulting ecologist.

Characters introduced in this novel

• Detective Constable Dominic Croft; a member of the West Mercia Major Crimes Unit assigned as Peter's liaison.

Reception

The book was well-received, with Sci-Fi Pulse praising its "warmth and sly humour", its rich worldbuilding and the plausibility of the police procedure.^[3]

References