Trouble Brewing in Harrogate – Chapter One

Lovely people, do you have your ducks? Are your coffee stocks laid in? And do you have a very big stick handy?

I hope so, because DI Adams’ third adventure (second Yorkshire mystery, third book, I have very much confused myself in the numbering system here) is almost upon us!

Which means, of course, that it’s time for a sneak peek at the first chapter, which starts with a bull, because how else should things start?

Read on below, and pop back next Friday for chapter two!

Not inclined to pop back, or even to read on below? Just want to charge into that pre-order? You are my people. 😉 You can get your ebook pre-orders in now at all your favourite retailers (links below). Paperbacks will be coming soon, as will the audiobook, read once more by the wonderful and talented Jane Ajia.

Pre-order Trouble Brewing in Harrogate on Amazon

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If you do pre-order (and thank you so much for doing so! It does wonderful things to the retailers’ algorithms that mean they’re more inclined to show the books to more people, which means more readers, which means more ducks), your book will appear all magic-like on your ereader on the 18th of this month. But, should you want to get in a little ahead of time, Trouble Brewing in Harrogate will also be available to buy on Ko-Fi from next Friday, or to download as part of the Hello Ducky or KEITH Ko-fi membership. (Fair warning, you do need to be comfortable getting the books onto your ereader yourself, but there are instructions!)

And with all that out of the way – read on, lovely people!

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Chapter One

So Much Bull

DI Adams sprinted across the field, head down, arms pumping, the long grass snatching at her ankles, and hoped in some distracted part of her mind that she didn’t stick her foot in a rabbit hole.

“Adams!” Collins yelled behind her. “Stop!”

She ignored him entirely. Stopping was not an option. There was a gate in the drystone wall ahead of her, looking desperately distant, but it was the only option she could see.

“Adams!” Collins shouted again. “Don’t run from it! Run at it and dodge!”

It was entirely possible that DI Colin Collins knew what he was talking about, given that this was far more his area of expertise than it was hers, but she wasn’t about to test that out. Hooves pounded the sun-warmed ground behind her, and a snort came from close enough that she could’ve sworn she felt the wind of it on the back of her neck. She swerved hard, sliding in the grass and almost falling, but caught herself on one hand, recovered, and pelted off at right angles to her previous track.

“That’s it!” Collins shouted. “Keep going!”

“Do something!” she yelled back at him, then concentrated on running again as the hooves bore down on her once more. She swerved a second time, back onto her original path, as 800-odd furiously grunting kilos of tawny copper hair and muscle surged past. And horns. Such excessive horns.

“Hey!” Collins was shouting. “Hey, over here! Coo! Coo!”

It was not a coo, it wasn’t even a cow, it was a bull, and a very angry one at that, looking nothing like the cute postcards of Highland coos that packed the souvenir shops. Not that Adams was looking too closely at it right now. She made one more sliding turn, the bull tearing past her under its own thundering momentum, then corrected course and sprinted hard for the gate while it was still trying to turn back. She could hear Collins shouting behind her, but if he was attempting to create a distraction it wasn’t working, and if he was giving directions she wasn’t listening.

She hit the gate so hard she almost bounced off it, but instead used the momentum to launch herself up and over the top, tumbling ungracefully onto the faint, overgrown track beyond and rolling once before she managed to catch herself and scramble into a crouch. The wooden gate looked hideously flimsy, and the bull was bearing down on it in a snorting, thundering fury. Adams had a vision of the beast plunging straight through the fragile barrier, smashing it apart and squishing her like roadkill. She flung herself off the rutted track and into the dubious shelter of the wall, out of its line of sight, and braced herself for the sound of shattering timber, wondering if she’d end up playing some sort of high-stakes leapfrog over the wall to stay ahead of the damn thing. But the bull came to a skidding, snorting halt. She could hear it huffing and stomping on the far side of the wall, but when she leaned forward to peer at the gate, it was just surveying the track with an air of satisfaction, apparently happy to have banished the interloper. She sank back on her haunches, head down and elbows on her knees, hands dangling between them as she panted.

“Adams?” Collins called. “You alright?”

She looked down at herself. At some point in the preceding fifteen minutes she’d stepped in at least one cow pat, put her knee in another, and managed to cover her trousers in dandelion fluff. But, on the upside, she was neither gored nor crushed. She looked up as something huffed at her in a rather gentler register to the bull, and discovered a Labrador-sized, dreadlocked grey dog watching her, eyes hidden behind his hair and his tail waving gently.

“Some help you were,” she said. He tipped his head. She could hardly blame him. If she’d been able to prance along the top of walls she’d probably have gone for that option too, rather than the run-for-your-life one. On the other hand, she also knew that animals were somewhat unnerved by Dandy, so she couldn’t help feeling he might also be at least slightly responsible for the enraged attack launched on her by what Collins had insisted was one of the most docile cattle breeds.

“Adams?” Collins shouted again.

She stood up, dusting her trousers off ineffectually. “Yeah, fine.”

Collins’ voice went up an octave. “Adams!”

She looked up. The bull was gone, an outraged, oversized missile pounding back toward Collins, who had made it almost into the middle of the field in his pursuit of Adams. He was already running, a big man hardly built for speed, but currently demonstrating a pace that could’ve put Usain Bolt to shame. It was no match for the bull, though, and Adams ran to the gate, clambering up a couple of rungs to perch there, waving and shouting. The bull paid no more attention to her than it had to Collins earlier, single-minded in its pursuit.

“Just run at it!” she shouted, and was pretty sure he said something which wasn’t aimed at the bull. He zig-zagged across the field, short-cropped hair gleaming in the sun and his shirt straining at the seams with the unaccustomed exertion. The bull tried to follow him, but it couldn’t make the turns as quickly as he could, and Collins didn’t bother with gates or stiles. He made it to one of the drystone walls that enclosed the field and flung himself up and over, taking half a dozen old grey rocks from the top with him and yelping as he fell.

The bull slowed to a trot then an amble, lifting its horned head and rolling its shoulders. The sunlight gave its hair burnished ends, and turned the horns into gleaming weapons. It looked at Adams, then back at the wall, and snorted.

Adams scowled at it, then yelled, “Collins?”

The bull gave her a final, disinterested look, then dropped its head to munch on a little grass. She supposed chasing police officers built up quite an appetite.

Collins’ red face appeared over the wall. “You were only meant to distract the bloody thing so I could get a look at its ear tag.”

“I distracted it,” she called back. “I distracted it so much, it just about flattened me.”

“That’s not a distraction. A distraction’s waving a bit and getting its attention, not playing chase with it.”

She turned her scowl on him, feeling the effect was diminished somewhat by the expanse of the field between them. “I used to work proper cases, you know. Murders. Drug gangs. Actual crime.”

“You chose to come to the country. This is a proper case up here.” He examined his palms, grimacing. “I landed in a cow pat.”

“A proper case? It’s a missing bull, not the sodding crown jewels.”

“A stolen bull with a pedigree longer than the damn king. A bull whose semen’s probably worth more than the crown jewels, and has likely been used to knock up a bunch of cows without authorisation.” 

Adams crossed her arms over her chest, still perched on the gate, and stared at him.

His voice had broken slightly on the last line, and he threw his hands up. “I know, I know. But a prize-winning bull like this has seriously expensive semen.”

Adams snorted. She couldn’t help it. It was ridiculous, but what could she do? This was her life now. As if moving up to Leeds from London hadn’t been enough. Moving north, when as far as her mum was concerned, anything beyond Watford Gap was a lawless wilderness populated by feral, blue-painted men wearing kilts. At least in Leeds she’d been in a city, with city problems and city crime, which helped ease the worst sting of her homesickness. She still missed the jagged, vibrant edges of the city that had birthed her, even the muscular, hungry turn of the Thames and its brutal secrets, although one of those secrets had been what sent her fleeing. Even so, Leeds had been alright. Leeds had been comprehensible.

But now, after finding herself constantly tangled up in the surprisingly criminal doings of the small, bucolic village of Toot Hansell, deep in the Yorkshire Dales, she’d ended up transferring out of West Yorkshire Police and into not just the larger area of North Yorkshire Police, but specifically the painfully rural and city-free Craven district. Which enabled her to keep a closer eye on Toot Hansell than she really wanted to (although she had to admit she needed to, because Toot Hansell involved a lot of what she termed other cases, which were categorically not covered by police training and which most people didn’t even know existed), and also involved far too much livestock for her liking.

Those other cases she’d dealt with since moving north had involved, among others, dragons (friendly, for the most part); goblins (very much not friendly, and in fact rather bite-y); strange creatures living in the walls of stately homes; talking cats; enchanted necklaces; duck ponds that were only bottomless sometimes; and far too much crime for any tranquil Yorkshire village to justify. She’d also somehow acquired an invisible dog, or rather a dandy, although she still wasn’t sure what that was, who was currently standing next to her with his paws on the gate and his tongue lolling happily. None of it made sense, and she still wondered sometimes if her official reason for transferring out of London, which was recorded as being due to a mental health break brought on by a traumatic case (monsters living under bridges and stealing children are fairly traumatic when one, as a sensible person, doesn’t believe monsters exist. Or non-human monsters, anyway), had maybe been more accurate than she’d thought and she was imagining everything.

She certainly hadn’t imagined the bull, though. “Collins?”

“Yeah?”

“Is it too late to reverse my transfer?”

“Absolutely. You’ll never get out. It’s going to be escaped sheep and stolen bulls until retirement, when you’ll get a smallholding and take up goat-farming.”

She scowled at him. “If I get a smallholding, you can send in the professionals. Yorkshire will have finally broken me.”

He grinned. “You love it, really. Come on. We’ve found the right bull, anyway. Need to talk to old Daniel up at the farm and find out just how he acquired An Gaidheal Boidheach of Craven Highland Reds.”

“Are you sure it’s the right one?” she asked. “Did you ask it? Take its hoof-prints?”

“No. I did manage to get a look at its tag while it was chasing you, though.”

“Glad I could help.” She jumped down from the gate and surveyed the field she was currently in. It looked a bit boggy to the right, so she headed along the wall to the left. She’d have to follow it around and find another gate or stile to skirt the bull’s field.

Bogs and bulls. These were the sort of things she worried about now. She squinted at the rolling land, the grass a long and vibrant green, the grey stone of the walls enduring like the bones of the country below the deeply blue and cloud-scraped sky. The sun was still high, even as summer loosed its grip on the high fells and deep valleys, the tarns and rivers and forests, and the smell of crushed grass and sleeping earth rose around her as she walked. A skylark dropped burbling notes from high above, and a couple of small, drably plumaged birds spun and darted ahead, hunting for sustenance in the long grass.

She supposed she didn’t hate it. But the smallholding would definitely be a step too far.

#

Back at the car, Adams scrubbed at the knee of her trousers with a rag, trying to get the worst of the cowpat off. She’d evidently slid through it, as the muck was deeply ingrained.

“You might want to start carrying some bin bags in the back,” Collins said, dousing his hands in antibacterial spray. “They come in really handy for things like this.”

“I have bin bags,” she said, and pointed into the boot, where an assortment of black bags were bundled around something. “My wellies and coveralls are still in there after the pig farm incident. I’m too scared to open them.”

“You’re going to have to get used to a bit of muck.”

She shook her head. “I don’t mind muck. But this is pig muck. And now bulls. I did not sign up for bulls.”

“What, the bulls are worse than goblins?”

Adams glanced around to make sure they weren’t going to be overheard, but the farmyard where they’d parked was empty. “Goblins can’t squash me.”

“You can’t tell me bulls are worse than the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute, though.”

He was grinning broadly now, and Adams sighed. For all the strange and – she hated the word, but – magical cases she’d been dealing with, it was true that the largest complicating factor were the ten ladies of a certain age who made up the Toot Hansell Women’s Institute and had somehow made themselves ground zero for all peculiar happenings in the Dales.

“I really think I’ve made a mistake,” she said aloud. “I’m pretty certain I can transfer back.”

“Maud won’t let you. She’ll probably send me off instead, and then you’ll have to deal with livestock cases all on your lonesome.”

She gave him a horrified look, and her phone jangled in her pocket. She dug it out, frowning at the display. It read DC James Hamilton. She’d worked with him in Leeds, but since transferring, there was no reason for them to still be in contact. They’d been colleagues, not friends. She hit answer anyway.

“Hamilton?” she said.

“James,” he replied.

She swallowed a sigh. “Sorry, James. What’s up?”

“Can’t I just call for a catch up?”

“You can. But I doubt you did.”

He gave a little snort that was half-amused, and said, “Can you talk?”

She glanced at Collins, who was leaning against the car and looking across at the farmhouse. They’d already been in to visit the farmer, who had made a lot of protestations about how he’d found the bull wandering about loose and had taken it in out of the kindness of his heart. He’d even suggested that they should be investigating the bull’s owner for animal neglect and maltreatment. None of which had convinced even Adams with her minimal knowledge of the intricacy of cattle pedigrees and breeding practices.

“Yeah, I can talk. What’s happening? Is everything alright?”

“Not entirely. Do you remember when you were still here?” He stopped, as if unsure how to continue.

“Wasn’t that long ago,” Adams said. “I haven’t completely wiped it from my memory.”

“Right, yeah. Um – there were a couple of weird things, weren’t there?”

Adams winced. There had been a couple of weird things. There had been a stolen necklace, which had turned out to be not just a necklace, but the repository of a dead sorcerer’s power. It, along with the dead sorcerer’s book, had almost been responsible for a large proportion of Leeds’s more enterprising magic workers being burned to death by a corrupt police officer. James had got himself kidnapped in the middle of that mess, but due to some rather special tea didn’t remember the stranger aspects of the case (there had been tentacles involved at one point).

There had also been a previous, smaller incident, which James did remember fully. He’d been mugged by what he insisted – without an awful lot of conviction – was a pack of children. Although there weren’t many children who squatted in broken-down pubs, singing the Doctor Who theme and mugging large, fit runners. Adams had sorted that out too, and had done her best to keep James out of the rather more esoteric elements that kept sneaking into her job uninvited. She would have liked to have kept herself out of them as well, but unfortunately it was becoming clearer and clearer that she had no more choice in that than she had about dealing with bulls.

“Yeah, there were some weird things,” she said to James. “And?”

“I mean, I don’t know exactly. It’s more an impression, you know? Like a hunch, maybe?”

Adams looked at the sky. There was no use being impatient with him. Just because she dealt with the weird on a regular basis didn’t mean anyone else did. “Not super helpful, James. Can you be a bit more specific?”

He sighed on the other end of the line. “Right, okay. Someone gifted us a few crates of artisan beer the other day. You know the beer festival’s coming up in Harrogate?”

“Yes, I had heard about it.” Harrogate wasn’t part of Craven, but it was within the North Yorkshire Police area, and everyone was aware of the festival. Nothing like an end-of-summer celebration of beer to legitimise some serious day drinking, followed by some afternoon brawling and evening driving under the influence.

James took a breath. “I suppose it was a bit of a promo for one of the festival breweries. Even though it’s not our patch, you know how these things go. A little incentive to not keep too close an eye on stuff.”

“Sure.” Adams looked at Collins, who raised his eyebrows at her. She shrugged.

Sounding as if he were choosing his words carefully, James said, “And since that happened, things have got a little weird.”

“Define weird.”

“Well. When it came in, I was on shift, so I didn’t have any. Plus beer makes me bloated.”

“Good to know.”

“Sorry. Anyhow, Temper had some, and Isha, plus a few other people who were knocking off.”

“And?” Adams asked, trying not to feel a little stab of guilt at Isha’s name. Isha had been … well, she’d been Isha, and Adams had walked out of Leeds without much of a glance back. She hadn’t spoken to Leeds’s computer tech since.

“And people have been acting really strange since.”

“Strange in what way?” she asked, trying to hold onto her patience.

“Temper’s really angry all the time.”

Adams rubbed her forehead with her free hand. “Temper’s always angry. Hence the name.” It was actually DCI Temple, but Temper suited him much better.

“Not like this. He threw a journalist in a cell for three hours just because he asked a question about car thefts.”

“Huh. Okay. That’s a lot even for him.”

“Yeah. And Isha’s been poking around in the station computer system and doing things like releasing wage details to show gender gaps, and compiling promotion records to prove, ah, certain people are being held back. Which I totally support,” he added hurriedly. “Only it means everyone’s getting their backs up, and refusing to work with each other, and it’s just a whole thing.”

Adams looked at Dandy, who was sitting by the back of the car, watching her intently. She couldn’t fault Isha’s motivations, but creating chaos for the sake of it was out of character. She was hardly some power-drunk hacker. If Isha was going to do something like this, she’d have had a 96-point action plan, three backup options, six virtual escape routes, and would have pulled off a bloodless coup before lunch with no way to trace it back to her. “Okay, that does sound odd.”

“I didn’t know who else to talk to about it,” James said. “I’m not going near Temper. There’s some other strange stuff going on too, and I can’t even say why I think it’s off, you know? It’s only a hunch. I suppose I could report it to HR, but …”

“Don’t do that,” Adams replied. “I’ll head over this afternoon and you can update me fully.”

“Really?” James sounded so relieved, she had a momentary flash of guilt over her impatience.

“Sure. I’ll see you soon.” She hung up and looked at Collins, who gave her a questioning look.

“Your expertise being called in?”

“Seems so. DC in Leeds is a bit worried about some artisan beer, apparently.”

Collins nodded. “I see the appeal. But it lacks a certain excitement when compared to bulls, wouldn’t you say?”

“I think I’ll manage.” Adams shut the boot and swung into the car, hoping Collins was right. Hoping there really was no excitement involved, and that James’s sense for weird cases was rather less attuned than her own.

She wasn’t sure she could be that lucky, though.

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And so it begins. Adams is once again being dragged into the weirder side of Yorkshire, like it or not. There will be dog chases and bike chases and car chases. There will be explosions and good coffee and bad ideas. And there will, of course, be magic …

Check back next week for chapter two, and don’t forget you can get your pre-order in now should you fancy!

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And not to forget, that for Ko-fi members and book buyers, you’ll be able to grab yours a whole week before anyone else! (You don’t have to be a member to buy the books, but you do need to be able to load the book onto your ereader yourself (there are instructions, I’m not setting you adrift alone!). Certain tiers of membership include ebooks or paperbacks, though, so you might want to check that out 😉)

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This beer festival’s going off with a bang …

A call from an old colleague has DI Adams off her patch and out of her depth, investigating a mysterious new beer with unexpected side effects. Side effects far more dangerous than a simple hangover.

Deadly brewers. Super-powered DJs. Raging florists. 

And it’s not just them. Half the police in Yorkshire have fallen for the beer’s spell, and Adams is barely keeping a step ahead. If she doesn’t figure this out before festival opening night the whole county will be under the influence of Niddered Ale, and there’ll be no sobering up from it. 

Not ever.

But she’s got her invisible dog, her trusty duck, and her really big stick. Plus she’s just dying to arrest someone.

If she can get past those superpowers and stay out of jail, of course …

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