The Crimes Against Common Sense

Welcome to Vesper City.

A thriving metropolis of opportunity, enterprise, magical innovation and civic excellence. At least, that's what the Department of Tourism would like you to believe, and they've recently introduced legislation making alternative descriptions unnecessarily complicated.

Vesper City is a place where gangsters wear expensive suits, magic comes with contractual obligations, murder is bad for business, and government departments can transform a minor administrative error into a constitutional crisis before morning tea.

Here, the law is complicated, morality is negotiable, and justice frequently finds itself waiting in the wrong queue.

But beneath the absurdity, Vesper City has a darker side.

Behind its glittering establishments, respectable institutions and carefully worded public notices are secrets worth killing for, powerful interests determined to protect themselves, and ordinary citizens trying to survive a system that appears to have been designed by a committee of particularly ambitious lunatics.

And occasionally, somebody ends up dead.

The mysteries at the heart of Crimes Against Common Sense are real mysteries, with genuine stakes, dangerous consequences and answers that must be earned. The comedy comes from the world surrounding them: the characters, the institutions, the contradictions and the astonishing lengths people will go to in order to avoid admitting they've made a mistake.

Rather than following a single detective through every adventure, the series explores Vesper City through different protagonists. A supporting character in one story may become the central figure in the next, revealing another corner of the city and another layer of its magnificently dysfunctional society.

Detectives, criminals, civil servants, business owners and other unfortunate citizens all have stories to tell. Some of them may even be true.

Beginning with The Fairy Godfather, the series combines comic fantasy, murder mystery, gangster-era atmosphere and sharp satire to explore a city where the truly unbelievable isn't the existence of magic.

It's the paperwork.

Welcome to Vesper City. Please retain your receipt. Complaints must be submitted in triplicate, and the department responsible for receiving them has been temporarily misplaced.