sixthlight

• It’s been roughly two years since the events of Whispers Under Ground, which happened from December 18-27th, 2012 or maybe 2011 since 2012 didn’t happen
• It’s after February 2014, as George Thames-McAllister’s car was registered between September 2013 and February 2014
• Peter’s dad’s gig is raising money for the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone; the first recorded cases of Ebola in that country were in May 2014 and it hit epidemic stage in September
• School and university are in for Beverley and Olivia, so it’s September or later
• Peter comments “most of the leaves were still on the trees”, so it must be the second half of the year rather than the first
• The sun is only starting to set in the early evening (“two hours after the school rush”), so it can’t be later than late October (when the clocks go back).
• All of which adds up to…well, your guess is as good as mine, but somewhere in September-October 2014, almost exactly two years after Moon Over Soho. The book takes place over two weeks, so it starts no later than mid-October. I’m going to say the first two weeks of October, as an approximation.
• Which means we have a whopping fourteen-month gap between Foxglove Summer and this book – so much for Lesley’s mysterious one-year deadline, which came and went before this book even starts!

Take-aways: I was expecting this to maybe be a book that covered a longer stretch of time, in the style of RoL and BH, but instead it’s another two-week case (MoS, WUG, and FS all also cover approximately two weeks of book time) with a whopping long between-book gap to inch us that much closer to the present day (and make room for Night Witch, Black Mould, and the forthcoming The Furthest Station). My best guess for dates is October 5th through October 16th for the main action, but it could honestly start anywhere between September 7th and October 12th. We seem to have traded certainty about the year (2014) for total uncertainty about the actual date.

Notes:

I added an extra day in when I realised Peter didn’t find out about the stolen grimoire and go to check it out the same day - doesn’t change the overall timeline much, though.

Holy shit the timing is difficult for this one. It’s compounded by the fact that Varvara has been staying at the Folly for “two months” by the beginning of Foxglove Summer. Now, seven days into FS Hannah gives a statement on the 22nd of June, meaning the girls disappeared on the 15th and Peter drove to Herefordshire on the 16th. Which fits with our mid-April date for Skygarden’s destruction, yay! BUT. It’s also August. Don’t ask. So…not that helpful for dating Broken Homes.

Furthermore, the Spring Court has to happen on March 22 or later, because of the time of sunset (6.15 on that date, just barely “around six thirty” as per Nightingale). We can’t open any later than Feb 20th to have time for the month to change and for it to still be winter in the beginning. If the Spring Court is March 22nd, then Skygarden is destroyed around April 15th - we’re not missing more than a day or two. Interestingly, while the book covers 2-3 months, the majority of the action takes place over one week at the beginning and two at the end; everything in between is scenes here and there (plus the Spring Court).

And finally, note that Lesley only spends six months as an apprentice at the Folly; mid-October to mid-April. She may not even have joined until November, as Peter refers to himself as having had “nine months head start”, and he didn’t master lux until early March. Either way, it’s not long at all.

So I’ve been listening to the Moon over Soho audiobook and trying to work out a timeline (largely in an effort to pin down things about Lesley, which was mostly not helpful) and, wow, I hadn’t realised how short a period it takes place over. The months-long timelines of Rivers of London and Broken Homes lulled me into a false sense of security, but the bulk of the action in MoS takes place over ten days - everything but the very last scene happens over less than three weeks. Also, Peter must have been extremely sleep-deprived by the end of it.

Anyway, since I bothered to work all this out, here it is for posterity/speculation/fanfic purposes:

Some implications of all this:

- I think if Nightingale hadn’t been sick and Lesley away, someone would have spotted something weird about Peter and Simone earlier. They spend an awful lot of time shagging for two people who live apart and have jobs, and Peter is under a great deal of time pressure in this two-week period. It’s quite possible his failure to connect her to the case is a result not just of magic but sheer sleep deprivation. Either way, it was definitely way too early to be introducing her to his parents - he knew her for two weeks total, and they’d only been in a relationship for a week by the time of the gig at the Arches, ten days if you want to count from the date at the patisserie. When Peter speculates on the possible length of the relationship it’s only been five days since it started.

- Lesley learns magic suprisingly fast; depending upon exactly when that “cold day in October” she demonstrates it to Peter is, she managed to conjure a werelight in something between three and six weeks, and it took Peter six. This makes me a little concerned for her brain - did Peter mention the restrictions on practicing to her? Would she have followed them if she did?

- Looking back at it I’m also surprised how sick Nightingale is throughout this - he’s still in a wheelchair in the early part of the book, but it’s been four months since he was shot. I have no idea whatsoever how fast this is as a recovery time but it seems slow (of course, in the latter part he contracts a chest infection.)

- The Faceless Man moves fast; he’s already looking for Simone and her sisters as of Day 6, Peter’s first visit to Smith, and he’s murdered Smith by Day 10 and is trying very hard to recruit Simone et al. by Day 15. The question I have is how he was tracking them down - does he have access to HOLMES? Did someone else notice them not aging in Soho? Peter is put onto the case by Dr. Walid noticing vestigium on Cyrus Wilkinson’s body, then a statistical pattern emerging…how did the Faceless Man figure it out?

- I’m surprised the DPS haven’t just demanded Peter be fired by now; in one week he’s involved in, count ‘em, six suspicious deaths (the Pale Lady, Alexander Smith, Tiger Boy, Simone, Cherie, and Peggy) and the week before that he hijacked an ambulance. And that’s after the Covent Garden fiasco. He must give them hives. (Then again, I bet Nightingale’s had more than his fair share of DPS attention over the years, when he was the only active member of the Folly.)