Review – The Hanging Tree

The Hanging Tree (Rivers of London #6) by Ben Aaronovitch

Another enjoyable entry in the Peter Grant novels.

Synopsis from GoodReads:
The Hanging Tree was the Tyburn gallows which stood where Marble Arch stands today. Oxford Street was the last trip of the condemned. Some things don’t change. The place has a bloody and haunted legacy and now blood has returned to the empty Mayfair mansions of the world’s super-rich. And blood mixed with magic is a job for Peter Grant.

Peter Grant is back as are Nightingale et al. at the Folly and the various river gods, ghosts and spirits who attach themselves to England’s last wizard and the Met’s reluctant investigator of all things supernatural.

The Peter Grant/Rivers of London series has always been an enjoyable, relatively light-hearted read for me and I’m happy to say that this one was no exception.  Like all of the others, there’s a continuing plot thread so I wouldn’t just randomly pick one up and try to dive straight in but there is also, as always, another plot specific to this book.

And, as readers of the rest of the series might have guessed from the synopsis, it involves Peter’s old nemesis, Lady Ty, the spirit of the River Tyburn.  Lady Ty is in fine form in this novel and we get to see a lot more to her than what we’ve seen prior, something I for one thoroughly enjoyed.

We also get to see other ‘inheritors’ of Sir Isaac Newton’s brand of magic, expanding our knowledge of the world of magic in this series yet again, something I for one enjoyed, especially after starting to see others in the last couple of books.

I’m still relatively disappointed by the female characters as we still don’t have very many definitively good ones, especially good ones with significant screen time, although Guleed does seem here to stay, which I for one appreciate. I’m  also still less than thrilled with Peter’s first person perspective, but I can live with it better than a lot of other first person narrators.  Mainly, I suspect, because the magic, the case(s), and Peter’s experiments with magic remain the focus.

And of course I continue to struggle with some of the British-isms sprinkled throughout the book, although I can figure most of them out through context, as with previous entries in the series.

3.5 out of 5 stars.  Another solid entry in the Rivers of London series, although it remains to me enjoyable and not amazing.