Breaking The Lore - Andy Redsmith

A magical, mischievous mystery perfect for fans of Douglas Adams and Ben Aaronovitch
How do you stop a demon invasion... when you don’t believe in magic?
Inspector Nick Paris is a man of logic and whisky. So staring down at the crucified form of a murder victim who is fifteen centimetres tall leaves the seasoned detective at a loss… and the dead fairy is only the beginning.

Suddenly the inspector is offering political asylum to dwarves, consulting with witches, getting tactical advice from elves and taking orders from a chain-smoking talking crow who, technically, outranks him.

With the fate of both the human and magic worlds in his hands, Nick will have to leave logic behind and embrace his inner mystic to solve the crime and stop an army of demons from invading Manchester!

Oh this book! It's been a while since a book has made me snigger whilst reading and Breaking The Lore succeeded more than once. I was reading this on the train and I'm pretty sure this is why people were giving me odd looks...

Compared to Ben Aaronovitch and Douglas Adams, Breaking The Lore is the story of Inspector Nick Paris, or Mr. Parrots if you're a dwarf, Nipparis if you're a (friendly) demon, who would like us to think he's a tough, hard-drinking, Northern police officer but when faced with the execution of a fifteen centimetre tall fairy, he's anything but. Confronted by the fact that magic does indeed exist, the inspector's investigation team soon consists of some interesting characters including his sergeant, Bonetti, not the brightest spark in the box but you have to admire someone who thinks Finding Nemo is a documentary! There's Cassandra, their 'magical' expert and human, a chivalrous elf, a troll princess, a demon Knight, and a talking crow with a penchant for cigarettes!

Breaking The Lore is a pun-filled, fantastical detective novel with plenty to recommend it. At 321 pages it was the perfect length to get to know our motley collection of characters, to be introduced to a side of Manchester that we never knew we wanted to exist, and to get completely absorbed by centaurs and the king & queen of the fairies. The queen, by the way, is not called Titania but Gladys, short for Gladioli! The mystery has plenty of magic filled twists and turns which will keep you guessing until the very end, the whole explanation for the existence of magic is almost completely plausible, and while this first adventure is all wrapped up by the end of the story I'm very much looking forward to seeing what Mr. Parrots does next.

Huge thanks to Andy Redsmith and Canelo via Netgalley for a copy of the book!

Breaking The Lore - Andy Redsmith

Publisher - Canelo

Release date - April 15th, 2019

Find - Goodreads | Kindle UK | Kobo UK | Apple Books UK

About The Author

Andy Redsmith was born in Liverpool and grew up in Runcorn. For university, he moved the enormous distance to Salford and has lived in Manchester ever since. He says the people there are great, but we don’t talk about football.

He worked for many years as a project manager in the computing industry, a job which really is every bit as exciting as it sounds. Eventually, the call of writing became too hard to ignore and he went off to do that instead. Over the years in IT he worked with some very clever people and some complete weirdos, none of whom bear any resemblance to the characters in his books. Honest...

He has a wonderful wife, a great son, and a loft full of old Marvel comics. One day he’ll get round to selling them. That’s the comics, not the family.

Andy Redsmith - Twitter