THE LITTLE PEOPLE (2021)

One of those small towns left behind by the 21st century yet simultaneously hotwired into it, Blackcastle is policed by the charismatic Detective Chief Inspector Fagandini of Cain Street nick. His manor is the same as any other hamet remodelled by one-time emergency legislation long since absorbed into permanence; but a social life being something that only the wealthy can buy as the rest are confined to quarters by curfews has not minimised the proliferation of crime. Instead, crime has inventively resurrected an old moral panic - the speakeasy.

Despite raiding the pop-up premises of speakeasies being viewed as the top priority of law enforcement, DCI Fagandini and his meticulous sidekick Detective Inspector Derbyshire prefer to investigate crimes they regard as more important, given half the chance. The sudden disappearance of a disturbed young man from a rented property housing several tenants as alientated from each other as they are the wider world is just the kind of case the DCI can get his teeth into. In the process, it sends Fagandini on an expedition through the rundown cocoons of the generations abandoned to an interior existence. When he discovers a connection between the missing person and a speakeasy organiser, the case opens up to shine an unflattering light on desperate lives governed by desperate ambitions everyone knows will never be realised.

Johnny Monroe’s crime novel hones in on the characters of a provincial police force confronted by the casualties of the society they are entrusted to defend the dubious values of, though the ‘hard, but fair’ DCI Fagandini is as safe a pair of hands that the little people of Blackcastle could hope for.