Who Killed Sherlock Holmes? - Paul Cornell, Damian Lynch

...but you're not.

 

This series is a sort of grittier, more working-class, darker version of 'Rivers of London'. Here, magic comes from the weight of London's history, not from river goddesses. The posh folks of The Folly are replaced by a team of London coppers used to bringing down drug dealers and human traffickers and the magic keeps trying to kill them 

 

This is the third book. We learned in the earlier books that something big had changed the way magic worked in Londo, letting looks bad things and tainting the magical community by allowing power to be paid for by money rather than personal sacrifice.

 

I've just come to the part where the event that caused this is being revealed 

 

This is where the magical Establishment - the Continuous Projects Committee that imposes civilised control on magical forces - gets blown away. It's clear that, although The Establishment continues using traditions that have kept London safe for centuries, they have forgotten why and how the protocols they use to do this operate. They've become complacent and vulnerable to attack.

 

(show spoiler)

 

Having learned all that, I got this:

 

 

'The real London was coming back, alongside poverty and tubercolosis and history. The civilised consensus was over.'

 

Suddenly, I was thinking of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, ripping apart all the shared assumptions and values that defined the England that the men and women who survived World War II had wanted to create. 

 

I checked the original publication date for this book. May 2016, one month before the Brexit Referendum.

 

It makes you wonder, If something evil broke into our world in 2016, wiping away civilised constraint, what would the world look like in 2020?

 

Actually, I think I know the answer to that question.