So today I’m writing up a novella in a series of novels, and a novel in a series of novellas.

The novella is Ben Aaronovitch’s What Abigail Did That Summer, which is a little side story in his Rivers of London series. As you’d think from the title, this isn’t a Peter Grant story, but instead features Abigail (who we’ve seen in previous novels) dealing with a smaller case. It’s a good installment — the story is standalone, and Abigail works well as a protagonist (and unlike the protagonist of The October Man, doesn’t feel like a clone of Peter). If you’ve read this far in the series, you’ll want to keep reading for this.

The novel is P. Djèlí Clark’s A Master of Djinn, the first novel in the universe kicked off in shorter works (“A Dead Djinn in Cairo” and The Haunting of Tram Car 015). I loved both of those earlier stories, and the universe — one where magic came back to the world in Egypt, resulting in an overthrow of its colonial occupiers and the rewriting of world politics — is fascinating.

The good news is that the series works just as well at novel length. In some ways, really, even better — having the extra room of a novel gives Clark the chance to let Cairo breathe a bit, to let us see more of it than just the handful of people and places that we need for a novella-length plot.

The one downside to this story is that it does rely on some idiot plotting, where the protagonist — a super-brilliant, famous supernatural investigator — completely and utterly fails to see some things that are super-obvious to the reader, and that should have been obvious to her, too. It’s always nice when you as a reader can feel a little smart, but annoying when you’re just waiting for the hero to catch up to something that didn’t require any major deductive leaps on your part.

Still, though it’s a flaw, it’s not a book-killer to me. As in his shorter works, Clark writes with tons of forward momentum, and this was one of those books that I kept picking up with every free moment. Combine that with an interesting setting and characters, and I’ll forgive some flaws of plotting. Recommended.