No Clean Getwaways

The Golden Glove is not a good pub. The floor is sticky, the windows get broken on a schedule, and the stew is made from bits that didn't sell. It is, however, the only place in Hillfields where the right people are. Jack Malone is a mechanic between jobs and a man between versions of himself. Iron "The Belly" Button runs the bar the way he used to run a fight - with minimum words and maximum consequence.
Jane holds the whole enterprise together with ladles, side-eye, and a Warwickshire stew whose absence is a weather event. Digvijay runs the sink - though nobody has called him that since his third shift, when drink and convenience swallowed his name and left Dishi behind. He quotes philosophy nobody asked for, keeps a tally of every debt and slight with the patience of a man who knows the ledger always balances eventually, and is never wrong.
Constable Colin "Skins" Mallory is off-duty more often than is strictly legal, and present when it counts. Rocco the pitbull was rescued from a firework and repaid the debt by claiming the sofa permanently. No Clean Getaways is a pub ensemble comedy set across the streets and back alleys of Hillfields, Coventry - a world of stolen sausage rolls, stolen wallets, council inspectors defeated by dogs, and the kind of loyalty that doesn't announce itself.
The stakes are low. The feelings are not. The Golden Glove has survived blackouts, vandals, health and safety inspections, and a formal tribunal over pastry theft presided over by a flatulent pitbull. It will survive. It always does. The question is what it costs the people inside it. This is a book about a found family who would deny being one. About the difference between showing up and being present.
About what a pub is for, when it's for something. Nobody gets out clean. That turns out to be fine. For readers who want their comedy warm and their loyalty earned. For anyone who has ever sat in the corner of a pub they didn't deserve and felt, against all evidence, like they were exactly where they were supposed to be.