Foxglove Summer

He called it potentia because there's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact you're making it up as you go along.

Dedication   This book is dedicated to Sir Terry Pratchett OBE who has stood like a wossname upon the rocky shores of our imaginations – the better to guide us safely into harbour.

But . . .” Dominic floundered around for a bit before pointing at me accusingly. “You said that there’s weird shit, but it normally turns out to have a rational explanation.” “It does,” said Beverley. “The explanation is a wizard did it.

In some households you only have to turn up three times before you’re expected to make your own tea, draw up a chair in front of the telly and call the cat a bastard.

The night may be dark and full of terrors, I thought, but I've got a big stick.

I took the swab using the collection kit that I’d borrowed from Dominic who, I realized, had left the Boy Scout scale behind and was now verging on Batman levels of crazy preparedness.

From then on, it was even twistier B-roads through a country so photgenically rural that I half expected to meet Bilbo Baggins around the next corner - providing he'd taken to driving a Nissan Micra.

There are people who have been touched by, let’s call it for the sake of argument, magic to the point where they’re no longer entirely people even under human rights legislation. Nightingale calls them the fae but that’s a catch-all term like the way the Greeks used the word “barbarian” or the Daily Mail uses “Europe.

Rule of policing number one – when something good falls into your lap, pass it up the chain of command as quickly as possible before something else bad can happen.

This is where the whole ape-descended thing reveals its worth, I thought madly. Sucks to be you, quadruped. Opposable thumbs - don't leave home without them.

The police never saw a noun they didn't want to turn into a verb, so it quickly became "to action", as in you action me to undertake a Falcon assessment, I action a Falcon assessment, a Falcon assessment has been actioned and we all action in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine. This, to review a major inqurity is to review the list of "actions" and their consequences, in the hope that you'll spot something that thirty-odd highly trained and experienced detectives didn't.

There's nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you're making it up as you go along.

The white boys knew they had my attention now, but hesitated -- that's the trouble with being a racist in the white heartlands, you don't get a lot of practical experience.

My milkshake brings all the gods to the yard.

Whatever was in the sandwiches, you didn’t want them getting too warm and going off, or starting to smell, or spontaneously mutating into a new life form.

Dominic tooled up five minutes later in a ten-year-old Nissan pickup truck that had been painted a non-standard khaki, dipped in dried mud up to the wheel arches and then randomly smacked with a sledgehammer to give it that Somali Technical look. I found myself checking to see if there was a mount for a fifty-caliber machine gun in the back.

I may be a city boy, but I'm fairly certain that the greasy purple and red squishy bits are supposed to stay inside the sheep and not be sprayed across a surprisingly large area. "Animal attack?" I asked.

I’m working on several theories,” I said. “But I’m currently favoring the hypothesis that the moon has a seemingly arbitrary effect on magic because it likes to piss me off.” “That’s a theory with a high degree of applicability to other spheres of life,” he said. “Yes it is,” I said, and we spontaneously fist

Caratacus suffered the double indignity of being taken to Rome in chains and having an opera written about him by Elgar.

I didn't think that Herefordshire Social Services would be best pleased about me dumping a poorly socialised pre-teen with mind control powers on them.

The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper. Eden Phillpotts ‘A Shadow Passes’ (1919)

I woke in the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions.

Taking a statement from anyone can be a long process on account of the fact that your average member of the public wouldn’t know the truth if it donned a pink tutu and danced in front of them singing the Chicken Song. This

I turned right onto the A410 which went north with suspiciously Roman straightness toward Aymestrey, which is less a village than a diorama of the last six hundred years of English vernacular architecture stretched along either side of the road.

Remember, Peter, the fae are like peacocks. They strut and they boast and they will expect you to do the same,” he said. “Put on a good show and you may be able to avoid an actual physical confrontation.” “And if I can’t avoid a physical confrontation?” “I’d really rather that you did,” said Nightingale.

Absence of evidence, as any good archeologist will tell you, is not the same as evidence of absence

Fuck me,' I said out loud, 'I'm in fairyland.

Missing kids are tough cases. I mean, murder is bad but at least the worst has already happened to the victim—they’re not going to get any deader. Missing kids come with a literal deadline, made worse by the fact that you don’t get to learn the timing until it’s too late.

If you ask any copper why they stick at a job which exposes them to abuse from everyone from petty criminals all the way down to government ministers, they’ll say it’s the variety.