J’avais un peu de retard dans ma lecture des romans de fantasy urbaine de Kate Griffin — et c’est tant mieux, quel bonheur, voici sans doute l’auteur la plus inventive littérairement de tous ceux qui oeuvrent aujourd’hui dans le genre. Son style est imagé, nerveux, plein d’effets de tension et de ruptures, de glissements poétiques et de descriptions serrées, c’est très personnel, très électrique, et j’y retrouve fort bien « mon » Londres, la magie en plus. En plus, contrairement à ses collègues Ben Aaronovitch et Mike Carey, elle commence à entrouvrir le domaine des créatures féeriques (véritablement non humaines) de cette urbanité surnaturelle. Extrait pour le plaisir (The Minority Council) :

« Look hard enough and you could maybe perceive the anomaly of things beneath the surface. When life started moving to the cities, magic came with it, and when the magic started moving, so did all the creatures that lived within it. If you wait until the dead, dead hours of the night, when the only texture on earth is street-lamp glow, you might see the metal of an ornate lamppost part and the grey-skinned city dryads peep out into the darkness from their wiry home. There, above a stone doorway built by men who believed in empire and cricket, the statue of a woman in classical drapes, face turned downwards to mourn an unknown loss and whose stone eyes, which should be sandstone beige, are framed with redness from weeping. And just below the artificial waterfall that glides down black marble into a pool beneath an iron grid, a shadow moves in the water that might be an infant kelpie, its skin the colour of the copper coins, tossed in with a wish, on which it feeds. »