The Rivers of London vs Money Hungry [Double Review and Discussion]

I often have more than one book on currently reading at a time and there are reasons for this. Some are practical. I might have one at home, one at work, on my Kindle Voyage, one of my Kindle App. Some are more just my style of consuming media. I usually reach a point with any media where I just get bogged down or tired out by the current plot. I've guessed the twist. The characters are dawdling. The author is dawdling. Whatever. Switching back and forth helps me to alleviate some of that issue.

It also creates interesting intersections. 

I am a big believer in the concept that the Book-You-Read is not the same as the Book-You-Hold.  BYH stems from a certain place in the author's life, the publisher's state-of-being, the editor's whims. The reality of the publishing world. The reality of your current bookstores or libraries. Insomuch, the BYH is really the Book-They-Wrote and Book-That-Was-Eventually-Made-Available-After-Very-Many-Business-Decisions but let's keep it relatively simple for the moment. 

The Book-You-Read (BYR) is the culmination of many forces: your mood, your other activities, the time you spend reading the book, your personal knowledge while reading the book, and [especially for book-reviewers and -analyzers and -sharers] your intended audience for sharing your experience. A bad week can make a good book go down more cynically. A good week can make a mediocre book shine brighter than it ever should have shone. 

In other words, the book you are reading by translating the words on page, pixels on screen, or narrator's voice (etc) into your current physical + emotional + mental bookly impressions is fairly unique. Generally you only break out of this by analysis and re-reading but even then you create a kind of Venn Diagram of Books-You-Read where the same book crisscrosses with its supposed True Self (ostensibly the Book-You-Hold).

And, most germane to this post, one book in a sub/genre can influence your take on another book in a sub/genre. Reading one author's mystery might make you feel better or worse about another author's mystery purely on the arbitrary aspect of which one crossed your reading space first. 

This aspect was tested a good deal by last week's reading: Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London (the first book in the Rivers of London series) and Joseph Browning + Suzi Yee's Money Hungry (the first book in the Salt Mine series). I picked up the first 18 books in the Salt Mine series through a Bundle of Holding deal and I had had Rivers of London via Kindle for a good while. Long enough that I went ahead and bought the "Tenth Anniversary Edition" to update it. Supposedly it has more of the original text. I have no idea what might be different. I could look it up, but I'm generally good. A lot of books and movies have a lot of various edits and editions and it can take a lot of time off your life if you worry too much if you read the right version. I'm just trusting fate at this point.

Both of these novels feature urban fantasy backdrops with police procedural trappings and both are pretty staunchly in the character-driven, mildly-humorous, fun-spooky camp. Rivers of London has more obvious humor than Money Hungry but the latter features enough quirks that I would not count it out. 

Both feature an older veteran type  showing a new worker around. This is a natural way to introduce the reality of the world to a reader. You learn about the truths of magic and the structure of the organization from a character's spoken viewpoint. It is not really necessary. You could simply write out, "The Salmon Foundation was founded in 1954 through grant money," but saying that to the new person gives it a certain vérité. It also allows the author to stumble a bit and find out some rules without having to worry too much about why a seasoned vet wouldn't simply jump to stacks of old conclusions. Money Hungry actually focuses more on the viewpoint of the vet while Rivers of London is told nearly entirely from the view point of the new hire. Both veterans have a fairly unique car as a primary style identifier. 

Both spend some time working on the rules of magic. In Rivers of London, there is the sense of magic having an energy source, one that interferes with modern technology in various ways, but the principle is vague enough to not have to be enforced at every junction. In Money Hungry, magic is tied to a sense of karma with the idea being that usage always costs more than it gains. At the crux of both novels, these rules are treated as a bit fuzzy which is a shame. One of the potential joys of such a contrast - the ancient rules of magic versus the modern world - would be working out how technology won. It is not really a contest but I feel like Rivers of London upholds this element better than Money Hungry though in principle I like the Salt Mine rules more. 

Both feature magical detective agencies that are past their prime. In Rivers of London, the Met has only one remaining wizard (I'm sure later books will hand wave this). In Money Hungry, the Salt Mine is down to just a few agents left and we only see two (plus the librarians and the leader and a few auxiliary staff). The former treats it as a changing society. The latter as evidence of how rough the field of work can be. 

Both are heavily marked by what you might call pre-scarring-for-sequels: where plot points and lines and holes in worldbuilding are left to aid complications and situations in later books. Which tends to trigger that "Doug gets tired" vibe, knowing that it might take three or four books to see how something plays out. Knowing that eventually some side plot might be more resolved but on the way a dozen more scars and wounds were left in the fabric of reality to make ready hooks for later volumes. Until the end of days and the sun goes black. Money Hungry largely keeps these to a minimum. If I never read another Salt Mine book (which I plan on reading at least two or three, anyhow) it would largely just be not knowing who or what a few things were but I could easily chalk it up to mystery. On the other hand, the Rivers of London series is left with the fate of multiple characters in question, several open plot lines, and a fair chunk of questions left to be pried open through the necessary of further homework (i.e., reading more books in the series).

Both are heavily influenced by television or at least pop culture. Rivers of London spends a few lines bouncing off Harry Potter (presumably as a perhaps unnecessary attempt to get ahead of potential complaints about magical police riding the coattails of the boy wizard). Aaronovitch (and Andrew Cartmel, who later helps with the graphic novels) are both somewhat known for their time working on Doctor Who. Money Hungry's blurb calls out entirely to television shows ["If you enjoy the TV shows Supernatural, Grimm, Eureka, The Librarians, Warehouse 13, X-Files, Relic Hunter, or Fringe, you'll enjoy the Salt Mine."] and not to books. In this way, they can perhaps be seen as responding to a pop-culture audience and less of a literary one. Which invokes different rules of pacing. The fact that they entrench it in the "new person showed the ropes" rather than simply spending a prologue chapter or such is part of this. A book does not need a character-as-wall upon which to bounce ideas. A book has the reader.

Heck, both feature pretty significant scenes in England. The one book is set mostly entirely in London (a few scenes being possibly outside of it but I'd have to go and check a map) and the other has its most significant subplot there despite it being secondary to the main plot which gets equal or less time.

The only real difference between the two is that Rivers of London is more obsessed with the romantic and sexual fantasies of its main character (Peter Grant). Grant is the kind of guy that spends a fair amount of his time when he is not doing magical detective police work by thinking about several women for their sexual attractiveness or romantic capability and even spends time in bed with one of his potential partners but somehow never just gets into a situation where he actually just says, "Hey, I'm horny, let's have sex."

In fact, if I had any real issue with Rivers of London it is the vague lad-ism of it. Most of the named women are discussed primarily in their aspects of sex objects, motherhood, or wifely potentials. There are others that are primarily discussed outside of this but not generally in a good light (the line between strong-female-character and bitchiness heavily tested). It begins to feel a bit weird. I do not mind a good horny protagonist but some of the lines just hit a bit weird.

This complaint aside, I think I would consider Rivers of London to be the stronger of the two books. Partially because I think the writing is just a bit more attractive. Partially because it feels like a pretty significant shift in the reality of its world. Money Hungry is a bit more plain, though still quite readable, but it does have the feeling that you are reading an episode at the start of a season that was chosen more arbitrarily. Rivers of London makes me feel like the author is excited to find out the mysteries with me. Like I am coming along on an adventure where things are just starting to cook. Money Hungry feels more like I am looking in a window at something that has already been pre-baked.

And, to Money Hungry's demerit, it has a strikingly abrupt ending that unravels much of the point of getting there. While Rivers of London has a somewhat Doctor Who-ish ending, where sudden pluck and change of mood resolves a lot in a short time right at the nick of time, Money Hungry's ending feels brazenly inadequate. Like a page count triggered a random dice roll to figure out who the bad guy might be on a Mythic Gamemaster Emulator Threads table and then some bare-minimum work stapled it together. In fact, it calls back to a scene so minor in the scheme of the book that it very nearly feels like that former scene might have been edited in to try and make a justification. My suspicion is that Browning + Yee had lots of ideas in mind for the world building (the magic, the agency, the agents) but maybe not so many for the mystery itself. Which is a shame. A stronger ending would have worked wonders.

It must be said, though, that there are two "twists" in Rivers of London. The first was so obvious in the set-up that it was slightly confusing why Chapter 8 treats it like such a heady wallop. The second is more minor but perhaps more impactful. While the Rivers of London ending is generally more satisfactory (even when it is clearly setting up a series of novels rather than self-containing one), the secondary twist would have been more interesting if we had less horny-Peter and more focus on his non-horny relationships.

I consider both to be GOOD novels, just Rivers a bit more-GOOD. Money Hungry is FAIRLY GOOD but I would consider the ending couple of chapters to be pretty POOR.