⭐⭐
I really didn’t expect to be giving a Rivers of London book two stars, but here we are.
I’ve enjoyed this series for a long time, and even when some of the previous books haven’t quite hit the heights of the best entries, there’s always been enough there to keep me invested. The characters, the humour, the world, the strange mix of police procedural and magic — there’s usually something that leaves me looking forward to picking up the next one.
Unfortunately, Stone & Sky is, by quite some distance, the weakest book in the series for me.
The biggest problem is that the whole thing just feels washed out. There’s technically a plot here, things happen, characters go places and mysteries are investigated, but so little of it felt like it had any real weight. I kept waiting for the story to properly grab me and give me that moment where everything clicks into place and I’m suddenly flying through the pages. It never really happened.
Instead, I found myself putting the book down more and more often and having very little desire to pick it back up again. Towards the end, I was basically reading because I’d already come this far and wanted to finish it, rather than because I was actually enjoying myself. Considering how much I’ve enjoyed this series in the past, that was genuinely disappointing.
Then there are the Abigail sections.
I don’t necessarily have a problem with Abigail as a character, and I’m not against spending time away from Peter or seeing this world from somebody else’s perspective. The series has a big enough cast and an interesting enough world that there’s plenty of room for that. But so many of Abigail’s sections in this book just seemed to drag on and on without adding enough to justify how much time we were spending with them.
At times they felt almost pointless. I kept wondering when we were going to get back to the main story, which obviously isn’t what you want when these sections make up a significant part of the book.
What made them even harder to get through was the language. The constant “bare this”, “bare that”, “ting” and everything else started irritating me very quickly. I understand what Aaronovitch is trying to do. Abigail is younger; she has her own way of speaking, and her voice should obviously sound different from Peter’s. That makes complete sense. But it just feels so forced here. It feels less like a character naturally speaking in her own voice and more like an author repeatedly reminding you, “Look, this is how this character talks.” Once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop noticing it. Every “bare” and “ting” started jumping off the page at me, and after a while I found myself actively dreading it.
The strange thing is that Aaronovitch has done distinctive character voices elsewhere in the series and they haven’t bothered me at all. Other characters have their own flourishes, rhythms, vocabulary and ways of speaking, but they usually feel like an organic part of the character. Here, for whatever reason, it just doesn’t. I don’t know what happened, but Abigail’s dialogue and narration often felt like someone trying far too hard to write a character who sounds young and relatable rather than simply allowing her to be young and relatable.
And when you combine that with sections that already feel too long, it becomes exhausting.
There are still flashes of what I like about the series. There are moments where the humour works, familiar characters I still enjoy spending time with and little pieces of the wider world that remind me why I’ve stuck with these books for so long. The problem is that those moments are buried inside a story that never really seems to find its energy.
Previous Rivers of London books have had that wonderful sense that London itself is part of the story. The magic, history, mythology and police work all collide in a way that makes the world feel alive. Even when the central mystery hasn’t been the strongest, I’ve usually enjoyed simply existing in that world for a few hundred pages.
Stone & Sky never gave me that same feeling.
Everything feels strangely muted. The stakes never seemed particularly urgent, the plot didn’t pull me along, and too much of the book felt like waiting for something more interesting to happen. I kept expecting it to eventually kick into gear and justify the slower sections, but by the time I reached the final stretch I’d more or less accepted that it wasn’t going to.
That’s probably the biggest problem I had with it: I was bored. Not angry. Not confused. Not even particularly frustrated by the plot itself. Just bored. And boredom is probably the worst reaction I can have to a book in a series I’ve previously loved.
Normally, finishing a Rivers of London book means immediately wondering when the next one is coming out. Even if I’ve had criticisms, I’ve still wanted to know what Peter, Nightingale and everyone else are going to get dragged into next. This time, I finished the book and felt almost nothing.
Worse, Stone & Sky has actually made me question whether I want to carry on with the series at all. I’ll probably at least see what the next book looks like because I’ve enjoyed so much of what came before, but for the first time, I’m not actually looking forward to it.
If the next book is anything like this one, I genuinely don’t think I’ll bother.
Maybe Stone & Sky will work better for readers who especially enjoy Abigail and want more time with her, but it really didn’t work for me. The plot feels washed out, the pacing drags, Abigail’s sections regularly feel unnecessary, and the attempts to give her a distinctive voice became irritating rather than convincing.
For a series that has given me so many entertaining books, this was a massive disappointment.
Easily the weakest Rivers of London book so far.
Gareth Ellis - Author 