Walk softly, and carry a very big stick …
DI Adams fled London to escape bridge-dwelling monsters and magical toasties – a one-time experience she’s in no hurry to repeat. She’s police, not some cryptid hunter.
Leeds has other plans, though.
Tasked with the seemingly mundane case of a missing necklace, Adams soon realises she’s stumbled into something inexplicable. The trinket is dangerous, and she’s the only one who recognises it for what it is – a weapon that could tear the north apart.
Juggling unhelpful colleagues, amnesiac witnesses, and problematic women of a certain age, Adams plunges into the treacherous, magic-soaked streets of Leeds. She may not have backup, but at least she has the invisible, caffeine-addicted dog by her side.
Plus a duck. And a very big stick.
She’s got this. She has to.
Because there’s no one else who can …

IN A NUTSHELL
That was my favourite Kim Watt book so far. It was fun but it also had a serious layer beneath it that reminded me of Pratchett’s Vimes or Witches stories. 
I loved that the plot kept tugging at my curiosity and that the people kept surprising me but most of all, I loved how Adams is developing into someone stronger and more interesting while staying flawed and a little out of step with both the human and the magical worlds.
I want more! I’ve already downloaded the third book, ‘Trouble Brewing In Harrowgate’.

 I stumbled on Kin Watt’s books this year and I’ve been binging on them ever since. Her latest series, featuring DI Adams outside the world of the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute and the Cloverly Dragons is my favourite. It has a harder, sharper edge than the Gobbelino or Dragon books. All the series share the same world, one in which most humans look away from the things that shouldn’t be there and so fail or refuse to see the magical Folk who live among them. What makes the DI Adams books distinctive is how she sees that world. It doesn’t trigger a sense of wonder in her. She can’t bring herself to accept it as ‘normal’ even though she’s sure it’s real. She senses threat and wrongness and she’s angry that it makes her feel a little powerless, a little out of her depth.

She left the Met after ‘What Happened In London‘ opened her eyes to the weird and predatory that others wouldn’t see. ‘All Out Of Leeds’ is the first book where I got to see her doing her job as a Detective Inspector in Leeds, without the involvement of the various residents of the small Yorkshire villlage of Toot Hansell. This time, she and her ‘posh boy’ DC have been assigned to figure out what happened to a unique and valuable necklace that has gone missing from the jeweler’s where it was supposed to be being repaired. What starts as a mundane case with some oddly malfunctioning CCTV, soon spirals into something involving fraud and abductions which, Adams is disappointed to find, seem to carry the taint of magic and perhaps even police corruption.

The story works reasonably well as a police procedural albeit one laced with humour and magic. Each step of the investigation mires Adams more deeply in the world of magical Folk that she’d hoped to leave behind her in London. Her life is complicated by trying to prevent her eager and competent DC from seeing the magical world and by accommodating the large invisble-to-everyone-but-her black dog, Dandy, who adopted her in ‘Manor Of Life Or Death’.

The story is brightened by eccentric, larger-than-life characters, most of whom are human and softened by humour and unexpected kindnesses that prevent Adams’ view of the world becoming irredeamably bleak.

Adams’ reluctance to see the strange things in the world that her encounter in London exposed her to not only makes for a better story but it’s the part of her character that means that she didn’t/couldn’t look away from the things she’s not meant to see and that drives her to stand up to them to protect others. Adams needs to enforce order, even on the unfeasible reality-stretching realms of magic. In this book, it’s starting to become clear to her that to do that, she’ll need to learn a lot more about how the magical world works. I’m looking forward to finding out with her.