Penny Thornton: Holding the Line — Planning Breaches, Personal Boundaries, and a Clipboard Full of Stubborn. Book 3

The pergola at Honeysuckle Lodge was technically a pergola. Realistically it was an ambitious folly with six posts as thick as a bureaucrat's skin, wisteria trembling at its base, and a neighbour whose koi were, according to him, clinically depressed from the shade.

Penny Thornton, enforcement officer, noted everything. The height breach. The overbearing impact. The koi psychology. Then she went next door, told Mr Bellingham that planning enforcement was not a community sport, and drove back to the office in a Skoda with inexplicable hay in the boot.

This is a day in the life. Then another. Then twenty of them.

Penny Thornton: Holding the Line is a spin-off from the Alistair Finch series, following the woman who has always stood slightly to one side of the main narrative — competent, dry, and entirely unwilling to be underestimated. Her caseload includes a turquoise door in a conservation area, a fence with a turret and three surveillance windows, a portable stone circle of uncertain planning status, and a caravan whose occupant insists on calling it a "residential arts hub."

She also has a horse called Moira who came eleventh out of ten at the local gymkhana. A cat called Poundbury who sits on files with intent. A mother who sighs like a kettle approaching boiling point. And, somewhere in the background, Alistair Finch — sending emails about case law, suggesting the pub, and being considerably more present in her thoughts than she would professionally recommend.

Warm, funny, and told with the affection of someone who has spent a long time watching the planning system up close — this is the book for anyone who always suspected Penny was the most interesting person in the room.

They were right.

Third of the Alistair Finch series. Can be read as a standalone.