Blue Moon Investigations

The monster is real. It is also, nine times out of ten, a bloke in a costume with a grudge and a get-rich scheme — and it is Tempest Michaels's thankless job to prove it. Blue Moon Investigations is Kent's only paranormal detective agency, run by a man who believes none of it. Clients arrive convinced of werewolves, witches, vampires, the occasional yeti; Tempest, ex-army and terminally unimpressed, takes the cheque and goes looking for the human being behind the fog machine. That the truth keeps turning out mundane never quite settles the question of why the dog seems to be giving advice. The spine is Steve Higgs's long-running Tempest Michaels line, where a one-man outfit swells into a team — Amanda Harper, assistant Jane Butterworth, a supporting cast of meddling parents and dubious friends. From it branch three regional franchises written by other hands: Sacramento follows the haunted, redemption-seeking August Watson (Alex Gates); Appalachia sets former FBI man Edgar Corey against genuine mountain witchcraft (Barry Napier); Boston puts career cop Chloe Mayfield into a hidden supernatural underworld of covens and cults (Justin Herzog, Gemma Higgs). The pleasure here is the comic mystery, not dread — brisk capers, dry banter, a rational sceptic forever one clue behind the punchline, and spin-offs that quietly let the weird be real when they fancy it. Begin at the start of the original Blue Moon Investigations run and read in publication order; the regional lines are separate front doors, each standalone.