Baton. Light. Chocolate. Duck.
This is not DS Adams’ usual kit. This is not DS Adams’ usual case. She doesn’t think it’s anyone’s usual case, not with the vanishing children and the looming bridge and the hungry river. Not with the snap-snap-snap.
But six kids are missing, and she’s not going to let there be a seventh. Not on her watch. And she knows how to handle human monsters, after all. How different can this really be?
So: Baton. Light. Chocolate. And the bloody duck.
Let’s be having you, then.

What’s better than finding a new book series that you’re excited to read? Finding two related book series that you’re excited to read.

Recently, I had the good fortune to stumble across Kim Watt’s books. I’ve read three of them in the past month and they all made me happy.

I started with ‘Baking Bad’ (2018), which is the first book in the Beaufort Scales series, described as ‘cozy mystery (with dragons)‘ set in a small Yorkshire village and featuring the members of the local Women’s Institute and Detective Inspector Adams, newly transplanted from London to Yorkshire and leading her first murder investigation.

Cozy mysteries are hit-or-miss things for me. I have to be able to connect with the people and the humour. ‘Baking Bad‘ did both so I went in search of the next book in the series, ‘Yule Be Sorry’ (2018). While I was searching, I found ‘What Happened In London‘ (2023), a prequel to the Beaufort Scales series, written to answer a question that had stuck in my mind when I finished ‘Baking Bad‘ – What had happened to DI Adams in London that made her leave the prestige of The Met answer to take a post in Leeds?

I loved the answer. As soon as I read these opening paragraphs, I knew I had another series to follow:

“THE BIN WAS LOOKING AT HER WITH INTENT. WITH INTENT. THE BIN WAS LOOKING AT HER WITH INTENT, and she had no idea how she knew that, or how it was even possible (obviously it wasn’t), but that was the current situation.

Detective Sergeant Adams of the London Metropolitan Police had no time for problematic (and impossible) bins. She glared back at it, daring it to … she didn’t know. Bins were not something she’d considered a hazard before, other than in the olfactory sense, or as hiding places, but this one was different. Everything about it was just a little off. It was marginally too big, or too small. The colour was fractionally too intense, the familiar red on white of the logo too sharp, or the logo itself too big, or too small, or too something. And she could smell curry spices for some reason.

“No,” she muttered, and the world around her lurched, the yellow light stuttering. “No, what’s wrong with me? It’s just a bin.”

She looked away, peering deeper into the maze of slope-walled alleys, looking for her quarry. They had to be in here somewhere. She’d been right on their heels as they’d plunged off the street and into the dim-lit, secret ways that ran like veins just beyond the skin of London. They couldn’t have got far. She should’ve been able to see them, unless they’d hidden, but there were no turnings, no doorways, just⁠—

“You,” she said, and turned her gaze back to the bin. It seemed closer. “But I’d have heard the lid go,” she added, frowning, and was sure – sure – that said lid creaked just slightly upward in response. It almost looked smug. “It’s just a bin,” she muttered, and shifted her grip on her telescopic baton. “You’re just a bin.”

Now she was sure it looked smug, but she stepped forward anyway.

She wasn’t going to be beaten by a bin.”

‘What Happened In London‘ is darker, faster and harder-edged than the Beaufort Scales cozy mysteries. There are no dragons, no WI, no tea and cake, just bad things happening on the streets of London. Things that can’t be understood unless you have the imagination and the courage to see things that shouldn’t be there.

Adams, a black woman who has pushed her way through to the rank of Detective Sergeant in the Metropolitan Police by hard work and the relentless application of logic, is faced with a case where children are being abducted from the Christmas market next to the river, even when the police are present in force There are no leads so, with the permission of her DI, Adams looks for patterns. She finds tenuous link between the abductions of the kids to the disappearance of homeless people. As she pursues this slightly improbable line of enquiry she starts to see things, things other people’s eyes pass over, things like the bin, looking at her with intent.

What follows is a first-class, original, London Urban Fantasy mystery, told with a style that mixes grit with humour in a way that I loved.

Inevitably, I found myself comparing it to Ben Aaronvitch’s ‘Rivers Of London‘ series. Although both deal with a London in which an unseen-by-most magical world overlays the city, the tone of the two series is different. I loved ‘Rivers Of London‘ but, reading ‘What Happened In London‘, I saw for the first time how privileged Peter Grant is. He has a senior Establishment figure as a mentor. He’s welcomed by the most senior Genus Loci and he constantly gives little lectures on architecture and jazz that set him outside most people’s experience of the world.

Adams isn’t privileged. As a black woman, she’s excluded from the Met Boys Club and constantly at risk of being ‘othered’, a risk that will increase dramatically if she’s labelled as the Fox Mulder of the team. Adams can’t afford to admit, even to herself, that she’s seeing things that other people can’t. She also can’t walk away when she’s the only one who might stand a chance of finding the stolen children.

I loved how Kim Watt uses magic not as a route to privilege and power but as something that preys on the vulnerable and the excluded, something that flourishes because most people would rather look away than see what shouldn’t be there. Adams believes that whatever is taking the children is also taking street people. Everyone wants to find the kids. Almost no one will even accept that the street people are missing. It was an excellent example of things that are real but which we refuse to see.

I quickly lost myself in this story. I was so excited to have stumbled across a first-class Urban Fantasy set in London that I had to make myself slow down so that I didn’t rush through the prose.

I’m amazed and a little disappointed to see that ‘What Happened In London‘ wasn’t one of the 2023 books that everyone made a fuss over. 

I loved ‘What Happened In London‘ and I’m hungry for more. I’ve already downloaded the next book, ‘All Out Of Leeds‘. It starts after the third Beaufort Scales book, ‘Manor Of Life & Death‘ so that’s next on my reading list.