the covers of the books in the Stranger Times series

If you’ve ever worked in a regional newspaper office - especially a smaller satellite office - you’ll feel at home with The Stranger Times. It’s an instantly recognisable archetype, comprising a couple of striving reporters; an insane editor, prone to mood swings and fits of bad temper; and an assistant or deputy editor, who actually holds it together.

There are the office managers or receptionists who deal directly with the public, and then elements of the great British public themselves, who wander in from the street in order to explain to journalists exactly why they fed a petting-zoo bunny rabbit to an alligator in full view of horrified children.

The Stranger Times staff are exaggerated version of the real-life versions described above, but not by much. Certainly within touching distance.

The big difference is in what news the paper carries. While newspaper offices across the country dole out colourful stories of local deliquents, council planning meetings, local politics, heart-warming (or tragic) stories of hospitals, lollipop ladies, feuding (or good) neibours,and more recently, SEO-optimised pop-culture spam, the Stranger Times focuses on the stranger titbits. There are marriages between humans and inanimate objects, UFO abductions, hauntings, and talking animals.

These bizarre phenomena form the background to this series of five novels, but they aren’t the plot. The staff don’t necessarily reporting that these things actually happened - only that people believe they happened.

That’s the starting scene into which our reader stand-in, Hannah arrives. She’s an almost divorced, formerly wealthy wife of a philandering husband - determined to finally stand on her own two financial feet, and desperately in need of a job.

She’s just in time to join the Stranger Times crew in Manchester as they discover that at least some of the supernatural hijinx on which they report is actually very real, very dangerous, and interested in them.

In fact, they’ve been surrounded by the magical ‘Folk,’ their allies and enemies the whole time and had not realised.

The first book in the Stranger Times series is ‘The Stranger Times,’ which sets up the world for readers, introductuces main and peripheral characters, and holds itself well with a central story that involves the quest for eternal life and the natural of evil. It’s a banger, and well worth reading.

The debut is followed up by ‘This charming man,’ ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart,” ‘Relight My Fire,’ and ‘ Ring The Bells.’ The last of these reads as if the late Sir Terry Pratchett and Ben Aaronovitch had a literary baby together.

All of them are hilarious, dark, and well worth reading.