Hollow Bank

The reservoir at Hollow Bank is emptied for maintenance every eleventh year. In 1994 it produced a bicycle and a shopping trolley. In 2005 it produced nothing. In 2016 it produced Michael Sharrow, who had been reported as having emigrated.

DS Nuala Behan is sent to reopen it because nobody senior wants to, and because she has recently made an enemy. What she finds is not a conspiracy — Quill is far too good for that — but something more ordinary and much harder to prosecute: a village that decided, more or less collectively and more or less by accident, not to ask.

Ayo Bankole’s Behan is furious in a very contained way, which is exactly right. This is the first of three; the second is with us now.