I spent 29 years in the police before I wrote a word of fiction for publication, the last 17 of them as a detective. So when people ask whether the investigations in The Devil's List or Hidden Cargo are "realistic," my honest answer is: partly, and deliberately not entirely.
Real investigative work is mostly patience wearing the costume of tedium. It's re-reading the same statement a third time because something about the phrasing still itches. It's the hours spent on paperwork that will never appear in a single scene of any novel, because no reader would forgive me for including them. Fiction has to compress months of legwork into the handful of moments where the case actually turns — which means every procedural writer is, to some degree, lying about pacing even while trying to tell the truth about method.
Where I refuse to lie is in how people actually think under pressure. Detective Constable Sid Thorpe doesn't have a flash of intuition that happens to be correct because the plot requires it — his conclusions come from the same unglamorous place mine used to: patterns noticed because you've seen the shape before, questions asked because the easy answer left something unaccounted for, and a stubbornness about loose ends that has more to do with temperament than talent.
The other thing three decades on the job left me with is a low tolerance for procedural shortcuts used purely for drama — evidence handled in ways that would collapse a case, confessions extracted in ways that would never survive a defence barrister, superiors who exist only to be obstacles. Real institutions are frustrating in far more mundane ways than fiction usually bothers to show. I try to keep just enough of that mundane friction in Sid Thorpe's world to make the version of policing on the page feel earned, without slowing the book down the way the real job absolutely would.
It's a strange kind of usefulness, having spent most of a working life on one side of an investigation and now spending the rest of it reconstructing that world from memory. I'll take it.