Broken Homes

Broken Homes is a novel by the English writer Ben Aaronovitch, published in 2013. It is the fourth book in the Peter Grant series, which mixes a police procedural with a working system of magic kept secret inside the Metropolitan Police.

Peter Grant is still learning. His superior, DCI Nightingale, is trying to give him a proper education as a magician's apprentice, and there is a great deal that Nightingale does not know either. The ordinary part of the job continues alongside the magic: a motor accident involving a man called Robert Weil, and the discovery of human blood in his car.

What follows takes Peter into the case of a young woman killed by a shotgun and buried in a shallow grave, and then to an Oxford University dining club whose members were taught magic by a man called Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Constable Lesley May, who has been on sick leave since she was badly injured in an earlier case, comes back to work after another round of surgery, and Nightingale begins teaching the two of them how to make a staff, partly in the hope of drawing out an old enemy.