History Literature / RiversOfLondon

* HauntedTechnology: In ''False Value''.

* AllAccessibleMagic: Inverse magic is part of the natural forces and works by taking energy from the surrounding world rather than that inherent to the practitioner. [[DisciplinesOfMagic Whilst there are multiple specific disciplines and traditions of how to harness and use magic]], due to sharing the underlying rules its possible for anyone to learn them with sufficient practice and knowledge, to the point that Lesley is able to figure out how to do a simple spell just by observing Peter and repeatedly practicing until she figures it out. However, untrained practitioners usually do not get very far, as, without understanding the basic principles, they do not understand how to stop the magic from draining the energy from themselves, leading to severe health complications and often death.

* SpellMyNameWithAnS:
** Lesley's name is spelled "Leslie" in the North American printings of ''Rivers of London'' and ''Moon Over Soho''.
** DI Stephanopoulos' name has also been spelled "Stephanopoulis".

** ''Lies Sleeping'': The full-out hunt for the Faceless Man takes place in form of the biggest joint operation the series has seen in all the books up to this date, and [[spoiler:the core conflict of Lesley and Peter is deeply examined. It all ends in Lesley becoming a murderer through shooting Martin Chorley, thus killing the BigBad from book two to seven but also destroying all of Peter's plans and hopes for a juidicary trial for Chorley and Lesley's possible redemption in an extremely cruel fashion. Through this, she also effects Peter's subsequent suspension from the Met. Additionally, Punch's backstory is revealed, there is a new river goddess, Beverley is pregnant, Peter makes another trip back into London's memory landscape, and much more.]]

** Nightingale and the Faceless Man finally get to butt heads in ''The Hanging Tree''[[spoiler:, although it's more a running pursuit than a straight-out duel]]. Other spells get tossed back and forth between Nightingale and some newly-introduced characters.
** Nightingale vs the Faceless Man in ''Lies Sleeping''. We even get two of them — but they are both mostly kept off-screen. [[spoiler:They both end with Chorley escaping Nightingale by keeping him occupied and held up through diversions (such as hostages, or attacking civilians) so that he can scarper. This heavily implies that in a staight duel, Nightingale would have been able to overpower and arrest Chorley by the end of the book.]]

* NotSoAboveItAll: Ty is the most high brow of her family and prefers to run in high powered political circles, but she chose to marry a hydrological engineer rather than someone more politically advantagous and when she's alone she relaxes a little and will actually crack a few subtle jokes, usually at Peter's expense.

* OurGhostsAreDifferent: Different enough that Peter and Abigail have invented a two-axis classification system, measuring their intensity (how "solid" they appear) from 1 to 10 [[Series/BeingHumanUK annies]] and their volition (how self-aware they are) in three categories: Looper (just a psychic echo endlessly repeating an action); Silmulacrum (a bit more aware of its surroundings, but limited — kind of like a video game character); and Entity (an actual personality you can have a conversation with). Their intensity increases if they can [[MagicEater feed on magic]] and Peter says even the Entities wouldn't pass the Turing test. That is, until [[spoiler:the ghost(s) powering the Mary Machine in ''False Value'' do just that. Somewhat justified, though, since they are stored in special "Rose glasses" that preserve them.]] Whether they're actually the spirits of the dead or just a LivingMemory, is something nobody in the books is prepared to make a decision on or has any idea how to test.

* PrivateMilitaryContractors: The American counterpart to the Folly turns out to be one of these, Alderman Technical Solutions, with a tendency not to worry about things like "jurisdiction boundaries" or "licensed to carry firearms in the middle of London"

* PsychicNosebleed: Chronic overuse of magic results in "hyperthaumoturgical necrosis", as Dr. Walid puts it. If you're lucky, a ''mild'' case will closely resemble a stroke and leave the practitioner confined to a wheel chair. More severe cases can kill in minutes and turn the brain into something resembling cauliflower. Figuring out exactly what the limits are is one of the reasons it takes ten years to properly train someone to use magic, and why even experienced practitioners ration their magic use to one hour per day.

* RankUp: Despite some set backs and hiccups, Peter has been rising steadily and estimates his career is about two years ahead of the average. Although considering how under staffed the Folly is, this doesn't mean all that much.
* ARareSentence: In ''Foxglove Summer'', Dominic comments that he can't believe he's saying things like, "Do we actually have an operational plan for dealing with the unicorns?" In ''The Farthest Station'', when Jaget remarks that "not assuming there's only ''one'' ghost" isn't often named among examples of good police procedure, Peter replies "Speak for yourself".
* [[ViewersAreGeniuses Readers Are Genuises]]: The books are best read with a ''[[http://www.az.co.uk/ London A-To-Z]]'' to one side, and a copy of ''[[http://www.bartleby.com/81/ Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable]]'' to the other. There is a lot of detail and you will need to keep up.

* RooftopConfrontation: The climax of ''Moon Over Soho'' and the climax of ''Broken Homes'' both take place on different rooftops. [[spoiler:The Faceless Man must enjoy this trope.]] Even the climax of ''Lies Sleeping'' partly takes place on, if not on a roof, certainly an elevated outside part of a building.

* ScareEmStraight: Wherever Dr. Walid goes, his preserved hyper-thaumoturgical necrosis samples are not far behind. They work fairly well once people realize they're looking at cross sections of an ex-practitioner's brain and not slices of cauliflower.

* ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney: The Folly's operational budget is the envy of the Met. It's funded almost entirely by renting out Casterbrook's land holdings, meaning that most civillian oversight committees don't have justification to look into their business and they can side step a great deal of red tape. Considering TheMasquerade and the questionable lengths Nightingale regularly goes to to preserve it, this is pretty much necessary to their continued operation. It's also another reason why the rest of the Met hates to see them poking their noses around a case - even if the Folly can dodge the oversight committees, the other departments can't.

* ScrewTheRulesIHaveSupernaturalPowers: A major headache for the Folly is that most laws written after 1800 inexplicably fail to specify whether or not they apply to supernatural beings and non-humans. They have to go through a lot of convolusions to keep the supernatural out of official reports, often leading to no charges being filed and another strictly off the books "arrangement" being put in place. Not because the laws wouldn't apply, you understand, it's just that the supernatural is so far outside of what legal precendent encompasses that it would be laughably simple for any half-decent defense attorny to appeal a ruling they didn't like. Add to that that the main the point of the Folly is to protect the {{Masquerade}}, clarifying the issue would be self-defeating and likely cause more problems than it resolved.
* ScrewTheRulesIMakeThem: Since World War Two, the entire official magical establishment of Britain has essentially been contained in the person of Thomas Nightingale. He might be "just" a chief inspector in London's police force, but he's been party to so many off the books agreements and grandfathered into so many organizational reforms that it would basically take an act of parliment to overrule him. Granted, a key part of how he managed to gain that much power is because he's eminently discrete and understands the admittedly broad limits of his authority, but when necessary he's not above ignoring official procedure and doing what he thinks his duty requires of him.
* SeparatedByACommonLanguage: FBI agent Reynolds looks blank when Zach uses the slang term "ends", so the group runs through several British-slang synonyms ("patch", "manor", etc) before hitting upon "hood", which she recognizes.

** In "The Home Crowd Advantage", Peter mentions an ambulance hijacking as one of the reasons he's not involved in security for the Olympics. However, the [[http://temporarilysignificant.blogspot.co.uk/p/a-chronology-of-rivers-of-london-books.html official chronology]] places the short story between the first two books, ''Rivers of London'' and ''Moon Over Soho'', when the ambulance hijacking occurs in the latter book. It can't be fixed by simply ignoring the chronology and assuming the short story takes place after ''Moon Over Soho'', because the novel explicitly ends in October, when the Olympics were long over. In the introduction in ''Tales From the Folly'', Aaronovitch says it was written to order after he'd been specifically trying to ''avoid'' mentioning the Olympics, and while it's "notionally" set between the first two books, it buggers up the timeline so much that it's probably non-canon. Either that, or Peter's hijacked ''more than one'' ambulance in his early career.
* ShellShockedVeteran: Anyone who survived Ettersberg, including Nightingale. 70 years of distance from the events have helped blunt the worst of it, but it's clearly still affecting him. Mentoring Peter [[spoiler:and later Abigail]] has helped his recovery to progress substantially for the first time in decades.

* MagicalSensoryEffect: Divided between ''vestigia'' the leftovers of magic that people with different sensitivites can detect as emotions or traces in their sensorium like tastes or smells and ''signare'' which is the vestigia that is specific and unchangable to the person casting it.

* MagicHarmsTechnology: Using magic will automatically destroy complex and new (generally anything post eighties) forms of technology. Its acknowledged by [[GentlemanWizard DCI Nightingale]] that this is a relatively new phenomenon, as he's lived most of his life (as in from the early 1900's to present) without it being a problem. Peter Grant, being naturally scientifically minded, dedicates a large amount of time experimenting to try to explain this arbitrariness and eventually discovers that magic destroys microchips and compressors (to the point of literally reducing them to sand). He also discovers this only applies whilst the circuit is functioning, to the point that simply removing the battery before using magic is an effective safeguard. Whilst the exact reason for this is still unknown, its generally agreed to be part of the same process how Magic absorbs its energy from the surroundings (including people if not used properly).
* MagicLibrarian: In ''False Value'' it is revealed that The New York Public Library System has a group of practitioners, similar to the Folly but without ties to the law enforcement.

* TheMagnificent: Much of the magical community does this with Nightingale, always referring to him as ''The Nightingale''. As of book five, some have taken to calling Peter himself "the starling", albeit without (yet) the prestige of a capital letter. In ''Lies Sleeping'', [[spoiler:this changes — not only does Peter recieve the honor of a capital ''The Starling'', but also earns the extra title ''The Herald of the Morning'']]. As of ''Amongst Our Weapons'' [[spoiler:they have one upped themselves again by adding ''The Harbinger of the New World'']].

--> '''Peter:''' ''AGI being the sort that was self-aware enough to pass the Main/TuringTest and ask difficult philosophical question before going 'Daisy-Daisy' and [[Main/AIIsACrapshoot trying to wipe out humanity]], while ordinary AI mainly tried to sell you books on Amazon.''

* JurisdictionFriction: Played with. It's outright averted with the majority of police: Peter notes that unlike in the media, the police services all work fairly well together and do not get possessive over high-profile cases. If anything, the opposite is true; police departments will actively work to transfer responsibility to other departments because of the massive cost and time involved in murder investigations so that it doesn't come out of their budget. ''However'', the Folly (aka the Special Assessment Unit, formerly [=EU9=]) occasionally shows itself to be the exception: their methods are so abnormal and their findings are so difficult to report and translate into the current system that they tend to negatively affect the clear up rates and records of any other jurisdiction they work with. While some branches are eager to call them in for anything on the off-chance they can foister their case expenses onto the SAU, others are desperate to avoid them: DCI Seawoll especially dislikes working with the Folly, partially due to personal dislike of the subjects involved and partially because he rarely ever ends up with an official, chargeable suspect to close the case, damaging his success rates.

** [[AntiVillain Lady Cecelia Tyburn-Thames]], the goddess of the River Tyburn and Mother Thames eldest daughter, is a cunning strategist with big plans to modernise the supernatural community and has been subtly working for decades to do so. Her intelligence is emphasised by the fact that she graduated from Oxford University with a double first, something she proudly boasts to Peter Grant upon their first meeting.
** [[BigBad The Faceless Man]] likewise also went to Oxford, as well as being a very powerful EvilSorcerer, he is also a brilliant ruthless schemer who has been successfully working behind the scenes for decades, consolidating wealth and status to make himself as a very powerful man both within the supernatural community and regular London society, [[DiabolicalMastermind with a wealth of both mystical and mundane criminal resources at his disposal]].

* ExactlyWhatIAimedAt: At the climax of ''Broken Homes'', Peter chucks at an ''impello'' after getting the Faceless Man monologuing, and the Faceless Man tsks at him and says he expected better after effortlessly avoiding it. But Peter actually means to [[spoiler:make Skygarden unfold, the way he earlier figured out it was designed to do]].

* EyeOfNewt: Peter has to perform a spell which called for the sacrifice of live rats as part of its [[RitualMagic ritual]] once, he got around this by substituting the rats for pound-shop calculators that the spell burned the microchips out of under the setting's MagicHarmsTechnology rules.

** The British tradition was formularised by Sir Isaac Newton and thus everything is in Latin. Due politics in 18th century, when they chucked out all their female members as part of their efforts to transition from a lose social club into an official state supported organisation, it split into two similar but distinct sub traditions of the Society of the Wise and the Society of the Rose respectively. With the Society of Wise styling themselves as official British magic, unaware of Society of The Rose's existence its members developing their own the traditions which they passed down their family lines.
** There is likewise a third more distinct British sub tradition, [[UltimateBlacksmith the Sons of Weyland]] who whilst sharing the Newtonian basis, were also greatly influenced by Pre-Newton magic techniques brought to the country by Spanish Jews and French Huguenot practitioners who fled to Britain in the 17th century to escape persecution. Holding their own base up in Manchester, with their magic revolving greatly around working mysticism with crafting and blacksmithing, it being them who held the secrets of creating the powerful Silver Magic Staffs. Whilst formally part of the same organisation, the Sons of Weyland held tight to their independence and always held a level of suspicion towards the Society of the Wise. [[spoiler: To the point they hid the fact their organisation and its traditions survived World War II from their counterparts.]]
** It's been confirmed there is likewise American, Russian, Dutch, French, German and Chinese traditions, each vastly distinct, however, not too many exact details are known due to the practitioners closely guarding their secrets. The German version at least shares similarities to the British incorporating several Newtonian principles due the close relationship between the Cambridge and Cologne Universities, although developed its distinctions by the practitioners of the White Library. Likewise two Chinese traditions are known, the one practiced by Madame Teng, that is seemingly inspired by Taoism and based in magical writing rather than spoken incantations, and the one practiced by Michael Cheung the Guardian of London's Chinatown, which is based around using magic to enhance the bodies physical abilities [[SupernaturalMartialArts enabling practitioners to perform superhuman feats]].

** Due to their supernatural nature, the 'villains' of ''Moon Over Soho'', [[spoiler:Simone and her sisters, don't realise that they haven't been aging for decades, all the men they date ending up dying, [[and that it's generally not good form to respond to the official girlfriend of your dead lover screaming at you by tossing the keys for your house at her as you depart.]]]]

** In ''Rivers of London'', Peter wants something that does this, and Dr. Walid explains there is no such thing (although he can come up with something that will work reasonably quickly at the expense of common sense and basic safety). That would be [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etorphine etorphine hydrochloride]] — an opioid derivative a thousand times stronger than morphine, commonly used as a general anesthetic for large animals and perfectly capable of causing fatal respiratory arrest in very small doses. Dr Walid helpfully supplies Peter with auto-injectors of Narcan (an opioid antidote) as well as a card to give paramedics in case of accidental exposure[[note]]"Warning. I have been stupid enough to stick myself with etorphine hydrochloride, the following is the list of heroic measures that will be necessary to save my life..."[[/note]]. Treated quite sensibly as the officer he's forced to stick with it — who is considerably heavier than the target he expected — still ends up on sick leave for six months afterwards.

* ObliviouslyEvil: The ghost of Henry Pyke [[spoiler:doesn't seem aware that the people harmed by Mr. Punch's antics are being hurt for real, not just pretend]].

* OurGhostsAreDifferent: Different enough that Peter and Abigail have invented a two-axis classification system, measuring their intensity (how "solid" they appear) from 1 to 10 [[Series/BeingHumanUK annies]] and their volition (how self-aware they are) in three categories: Looper (just a psychic echo endlessly repeating an action); Silmulacrum (a bit more aware of its surroundings, but limited — kind of like a video game character); and Entity (an actual personality you can have a conversation with). Their intensity increases if they can [[MagicEater feed on magic]] and Peter says even the Entities wouldn't pass the Turing test. That is, until [[spoiler:the ghost(s) powering the Mary Machine in ''Literature/FalseValue'' do just that. Somewhat justified, though, since they are stored in special "Rose glasses" that preserve them.]] Whether they're actually the spirits of the dead or just a LivingMemory, is something nobody in the books is prepared to make a decision on or has any idea how to test.

** In "The Home Crowd Advantage", Peter mentions an ambulance hijacking as one of the reasons he's not involved in security for the Olympics. However, the [[http://temporarilysignificant.blogspot.co.uk/p/a-chronology-of-rivers-of-london-books.html official chronology]] places the short story between the first two books, ''Rivers of London'' and ''Moon Over Soho'', when the ambulance hijacking occurs in the latter book. It can't be fixed by simply ignoring the chronology and assuming the short story takes place after ''Moon Over Soho'', because the novel explicitly ends in October, when the Olympics were long over. In the introduction in ''Tales From the Folly'', Aaronovitch says it was written to order after he'd been specifically trying to ''avoid'' mentioning the Olympics, and while it's "notionally" set between the first two books, it buggers up the timeline so much that it's probably non-canon.

** In book six, Peter believes that Nightingale feels that applying to a panel to change your legal gender is "intrinsically un-British", like eugenics legislation, banning the burka and air conditioning.

** In book six, [[spoiler:some enigmatic Americans from a rival Newtonian magical tradition ''try'' to play this role in the search for Reynard. Played with in that they're off their turf and ''badly'' out of their league when the Faceless Man shows up. Their official name is the Virginia Gentlemen's Company, but Nightingale says that when he worked with them during the war, they were nicknamed [[EmbarassingNickname the Virgins]]. ''Winter's Gift'' adds [[spoiler: that they're known by that nickname to the US magical community as well, and are basically seen as magic Pinkertons]].

** In book six, [[spoiler:some enigmatic Americans from a rival Newtonian magical tradition ''try'' to play this role in the search for Reynard. Played with in that they're off their turf and ''badly'' out of their league when the Faceless Man shows up.]]

** A literal one in ''Foxglove Summer''. Nightengale sends Peter some things for his stay in the country. Along with some vintage tweed, this includes a hunting shotgun. Since this is something a policeman should not have in a high-profile investigation, Peter keeps it hidden. [[spoiler:In the climax, guess what Beverly points at the Fairy Queen.]]

* HideYourChildren: Although it's clear that the adult vampires from book one were the parents of school-age children, Nightingale opts to cut short the search of their suburban home and contain the infection (i.e. burn the place to the ground) before either child's body — whether undead or dead — is actually seen.

* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: In book one, Isis swears on her true name, her husband's life, and the future prospects of the Oxford Rowing Team that Peter will be safe.

* {{Bishonen}}: Inexplicably, Nightingale is turned into one of these on the [[http://temporarilysignificant.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/japanese-cover.html Japanese]] [[http://i.imgur.com/2aMXbwo.jpg covers]].

** Again in ''False Value'': when Peter skypes with Agent Reynolds, they half-jokingly assume that they are likely under surveillance from the NSA. So, in the conversation, they sometimes pause to give the NSA a chance to reveal themselves.