The Furthest Station

May 8, 2017
Aaronovitch’s novella featuring PC Peter Grant of London’s Special Assessment Unit (aka the Folly), which has the brief of investigating “disruptive phantasmagoria,” is an excellent entry point to the Peter Grant series for newcomers who like their urban fantasies rendered with a light touch. Reports of a ghost on the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground prompt Peter to investigate, and he soon finds an eyewitness who saw a man fade out from view right in front of her eyes. But others who had reported having been assaulted by a “man who wasn’t there” are less cooperative: seven complainants deny that anything untoward ever happened and even that they’d made complaints in the first place. The story is intriguing enough to pull readers along, and Peter’s dry humor will linger in the memory: at one point he describes a shopping center that artfully combines “a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built.” Agent: John Berlyne, Zeno.