Finch's First Fall. Book 2

Alistair Finch is a graduate planning officer in Leeds. He has a novelty traffic cone tie, a wife who has stopped speaking to him, and a twelve-to-one defeat at planning committee over an illuminated kebab shop sign. Something has to give.

What gives is Alistair himself — who applies for a post at North Wensleydale District Council, a rural backwater staffed by a pipe-smoking senior officer who may or may not have written himself out of the fire safety regulations, an admin assistant who communicates entirely in warnings, and a typing pool that treats probationary officers with the warmth of a damp February.

Finch's First Fall is the second book in the Alistair Finch series — a slow, funny, affectionate comedy about a city planner discovering that rural planning is exactly as strange as urban planning, only with more sheep, fewer pavements, and an enforcement backlog that nobody alive can explain.

For anyone who has ever written a report nobody read, presented a recommendation that got ignored, or tried to explain to a committee that a kebab shop is not, in fact, the Taj Mahal.