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Description
These are not your usual private detectives, although there are occasions when they fancy themselves as such. So the usual detective tropes are lightly explored and, I hope, taken in new directions. The private detective in the first of the three Chronicles is a five foot, genderless hacker who was recruited to The Company when a teenager. He is called Sean. One line of work requiring Sean's specialist skills is doing background checks on prospective brides and grooms, especially on those couples continents apart. He is often helped in this by the firm's regular interpreter Mrs P [Patel]. However something about this latest case however doesn't feel right, so Sean investigates the commissioning client. Who turns out to be not a parent, but a Mumbai firm called The Theodorus Agency. (Theodorus was an ancient philosopher known mostly for his atheism.) The Theodorus Agency, registered to nine Indian oligarchs, want Sean's company to expose a slave-trafficking operation being run by the supposed 'groom' Damodar Naik. With no-one else available Sean and Mrs P are sent to Lancashire to check on those latest shops and salons acquired and newly staffed by Damodar Naik. Subsequent to an encounter with Damodar Naik, minder Paul is dispatched to protect them.
The second Chronicle has Donny, left alone while his co-manager, Mavis, and boss Marcus, are on holiday Donny takes on the case of a Mr H, who is concerned that the government has been secretly dumping radioactive waste near his property in North Wales. Mr H owns a string of motorway hotels. The only team available to Donny for fieldwork are from what is now Paul's own company. Sean has ended up working for him and, since the operation on his larynx – he squeaked before – now insists on being known as XSean. His protector is a giant of a man called Basil. Basil's history is told via Paul's son, Callum, who became a cage fighter. Callum was due to fight Berserker Basil, who beat his opponents to insensible pulp. A crowd favourite.
Outside of the cage Basil was not so much the gentle giant as equable. With the appropriate meters to warn of proximity to nuclear waste and lectures on how to stay safe XSean and Basil are sent to investigate the old lead mine that is suspected of now being used as a store for nuclear waste.
The third Chronicle, subtitled A Woman Wronged, also has extreme characters placed in peculiar circumstances. The narrator here is Marcus Glass, founder of The Company, and overseeing the investigation into another Private Detective agency – at the behest of a 'mixed race lesbian' hedge fund manager.
Newly-retired Marcus delegates the task to his new CEO, high-hair Donny, who in turn delegates to the new office manager, round and red Archibald Longman. What the client wants is to find some dirt on the Private Detective agency who once fabricated damaging lies about her. That the agency boasts about their 'probity' is what most annoys Marcus. His thoughts: '...all detective agencies would … at times have bent rules, would have told lies and practised every other kind of human deceit – to uncover a truth. A truth like a tiny diamond passed through the bowel of our illicit seeking, that would have our fingers sift through our own turds to extract it.' Marcus throughout, beset by moral uncertainty, is also investigating his own life.
