The October Man

This story and the characters involved in it are not particularly wonderful or superlative, but I find it surprisingly congenial, and always enjoy rereading it.

If you've been reading the rest of the series, it makes a change to go off to Germany and take a holiday from the characters and events in England. We still get the congenial Aaronovitch writing style; the characters are new and German, but worth meeting. Tobias is a calmer German equivalent of Peter Grant, and Vanessa is a less sexy German equivalent of Lesley May. They both seem relatively normal people, by the standards of this series, but I like both of them, and I'd be glad to see more of them sometime. We see very little of the Director—the female German equivalent of Nightingale in England—so perhaps we'll learn more about her later.

I suppose you could read this novella without having read the rest of the series. There are some brief mentions of people and events in England, but they're not important to the story. Vanessa is entirely new to magic and needs to have it explained to her, so that will serve for new readers too.

At my 8th reading of this novella, it occurred to me that I always like reading about characters being introduced to magic for the first time; so that's one of the attractions of this story.

The plot involves some strange deaths around a winery. It's rather complicated, and a river goddess turns out to be a significant part of it: they exist in Germany, of course, as well as in England.

One reason that I like it is that there's less mayhem than in the rest of the series. True, there are some strange and unpleasant deaths, but they're of people we don't know: we encounter them already dead. Tobias and Vanessa reach the end of the story having had some moments of danger, but relatively little compared with what their English equivalents go through.

Danger-addicts may be disappointed, but a little danger goes a long way with me, and this story is closer to my comfort zone than the others are.

Apart from being set in Germany, I notice a couple of differences from the rest of the series:

1. The series as a whole includes plenty of sexual attractions and relationships. But Tobias and Vanessa are both entirely single and seem to be attracted neither to each other nor to anyone else. Maybe they're just too busy, in the course of this novella.

2. The Peter Grant stories often use ungrammatical expressions such as “Me and Lesley did something”. However, this story—with a German first-person protagonist but written almost entirely in English—consistently uses the correct “Vanessa and I did something”, showing that Aaronovitch (or his editor) can get it right if he puts his mind to it. Perhaps he's trying to show that you're more likely to get correct English from foreigners than from the natives.

While it's set in the same universe as the Peter Grant stories, this book has a completely different cast of characters. Tobias Winter is not exactly a German version of Peter, he's much too serious for that. I missed Kobna Holdbrook-Smith's narration from the start, and it took me a while to get used to the voice of Peter. Good job affecting a German accent, even if it sounds grating to my ears. I wonder how those reader feel who don't understand the many German word that get thrown in at every opportunity.