Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch

I have recently again been at the long, arduous, and mostly thankless task of finding fantasy books that are actually well-written, and have in the last few weeks discarded a very large number of really bad ones that I didn't even bother recording here because I never managed to get over 50 pages in on account of the terrible writing. But finally I dredged up this absolute gem. I don't know why, when searching for fantasy novels, I come up with a million and one horrible series about kingdoms called Gazithor peopled by creepy elves, while amazing books like this are just never mentioned. This is a hilarious and lively story about a training police officer who gets recruited into the supernatural division of the Met. I saw some review of it that said it was like if Harry Potter had joined the police, and that is NOT what it's like AT ALL, it's ever so much better. Especially seeing as the main character is a mixed-race man in his 20s from a north London council estate with a hysterical sense of humour, not to mention super smart (very much unlike Harry Potter, possibly the stupidest protagonist in history). I'm not very interested in plots, but the story was pretty good (basically, if you ever thought Punch and Judy shows were creepy, Ben Aaronovitch agrees with you), however, what really pulled me in and kept my attention was the narrative voice. The main character/narrator is really funny and has a lot of great comments to make about London, the police, and people in general. The dialogue is lively and engaging, fully of wonderful exchanges like this one:
              'I'm just going to have a chat with this troll,' said Nightingale.
              'Sir,' I said, 'I think we're supposed to call them rough sleepers.'
              'Not this one we don't,' said Nightingale. 'He's a troll.'
I honestly couldn't stop laughing. Incidentally, the narrator's childhood home is located literally a few hundred meters from where I currently live. Aaronovitch also uses the narrator, who apparently hadn't paid a lot of attention in school, as a way to keep the readers informed about London's locales and history, but I didn't really like this, because you would have had to pay not only zero attention in school, but literally not ever have seen London to somehow not know what the River Tyburn is or that St Paul's Church is called the Actor's Church. This is just basic London 101. But for the most part, I absolutely loved all of it. I got a bit confused in some of the characters (because they have really long names and I was reading really fast and there are a lot of them) and I wasn't really clear on how the magic world works, but that might have been me not paying enough attention because I was laughing so much and so eager to read more. I was just torn between not wanting to put it down and trying to make it last for as long as possible. Luckily, there are a lot more books in the series, which I will definitely be looking into.