Winter's Gifts

This story is sold as a novella, so I'll call it a novella, but the hardback has 224 pages. It's the longest novella I've come across so far, and I know of shorter works that have been sold as novels. For the Hugo and Nebula Awards, a story exceeding 40,000 words is a novel; unfortunately the Kindle doesn't give me a word count, but I strongly suspect that this ‘novella' is over the limit.The Rivers of London series has a large cast of interesting characters, mostly based in London, England. We've already seen one novella ([b:The October Man 42389859 The October Man (Rivers of London, #7.5) Ben Aaronovitch https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1543258560l/42389859.SY75.jpg 66064112]) that abandoned them all for an adventure with different characters in Germany; and now this novella abandons them again, for an adventure with Kimberley Reynolds in the USA.In [b:The October Man 42389859 The October Man (Rivers of London, #7.5) Ben Aaronovitch https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1543258560l/42389859.SY75.jpg 66064112], the hero was Tobias Winter, a German practitioner (magic user). The difference here is that Kimberley hasn't learned to do magic, although she has at least learned to sense it: she can detect vestigia. When necessary, she deals with life-threatening menaces in the American way, by shooting them with whatever gun comes to hand; and she uses at least three different guns in the course of this story.From my point of view, this novella has various disadvantages compared with the rest of the series:1. None of the regular characters, except Kimberley of course, and Peter Grant briefly on the phone.2. The new characters provided in this setting are unmemorable. Bill Boyd has some attention given to him as a character, and he's congenial, but still not really memorable.3. Almost no use of magic by practitioners, although there are some supernatural phenomena.4. Most of the story takes place in very cold, snowy conditions, which is a setting I don't find attractive. I like to be warm.Despite these disadvantages, it makes quite a good story, it's exciting and it has pace. I enjoyed it well enough to award three stars on first reading, and I was surprised to enjoy it more on second reading—though not enough yet to award four stars.The author has deliberately taken himself out of his comfort zone, writing about America from an American's point of view, and he's done it successfully enough for me (I'm not American). Compared with the other books in this series, this one is also unusual in emphasizing story over characters: the characters are relatively muted here, although we get quite a lot of Kimberley because it's all told from her point of view.Kimberley Reynolds had a useful part to play in [b:Whispers Under Ground 10814687 Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London, #3) Ben Aaronovitch https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349807829l/10814687.SY75.jpg 14864236] and has been mostly off-stage since then. With this novella, we get to know her better, but she's still not one of my favourite characters of the series. She's OK, but I find her less interesting and amusing than most of the London-based characters.