Now Then Lad...

Book excerpt: A true-life Heartbeat for the twenty-first century. Yorkshireman Mike Pannett has just taken up a new posting as a local bobby in rural North Yorkshire. It's quite a change from the Met, where he dealt with riots on the capital's streets and drug gangs in Battersea, and found out what it was like to stare down the wrong end of a sawn-off shotgun. Now, instead of hunting down knife-wielding muggers, he's chasing runaway bullocks, holding up the Last Night of the Proms traffic to escort a lost mole across the road and combing the countryside for the villains who stole the Colonel's balls. Mike's first year on his new patch is told in seventeen chapters which interweave his escapades on the beat month by month together with his growing knowledge of a landscape that changes with the seasons and some snapshots from his off-duty life. Here is a wonderfully entertaining celebration of North Yorkshire, its breathtaking scenery and wide variety of characters and communities.