Broken Homes characters

Appears from the start

The Folly's apprentice wizard and a detective constable, now a couple of years into his training and comfortable enough in the job to run his own lines of inquiry. His fascination with architecture and how London actually works - usually a distraction - becomes central when a scatter of odd deaths starts pointing at a south London tower block. The hunt for the Faceless Man, the trained black magician the Folly has been tracking since the jazz vampire affair, shapes everything he does.

Appears from the start

Once the most promising officer of her intake, her face destroyed by the possession at the end of the Covent Garden affair, she is now the Folly's second apprentice, training in magic alongside Peter and wearing a mask in public. Practical, sharp, and harder-edged than she was, she is in many ways a better copper than Peter, and their partnership - equal parts friendship and rivalry - anchors the Folly's casework.

Appears from the start

Master of the Folly and the last officially sanctioned English wizard, fully recovered and training two apprentices for the first time in decades. Behind his old-world courtesy he is preparing his small institution for a fight: the Faceless Man is no longer a rumour but a strategic opponent, and Nightingale's wartime-honed judgement about when to negotiate and when to strike keeps the apprentices alive.

Appears from the start

The Folly's silent housekeeper, inhumanly quick and sharp-toothed, whose cooking has been growing more experimental. She remains the constant of the household: watchful, loyal, and never explained.

Also known as The Faceless Man

Appears from the start

The trained, ruthless black magician the Folly has been hunting since he surfaced during the jazz vampire case: a student of Geoffrey Wheatcroft's illegal Oxford teaching who went far beyond his master, his identity hidden behind a blurring glamour. He has money, organization, and projects whose purposes the Folly can only guess at - and evidence in this case keeps suggesting his hand at work behind seemingly unrelated deaths.

First appears in chapter 5

A German-born modernist architect, long dead, whose work becomes the case's central puzzle. Stromberg designed the Skygarden Estate in south London - a brutalist tower and its surrounding blocks - and the investigation gradually reveals that he knew about magic and built that knowledge into his architecture, leaving behind a structure that is more than housing.

First appears in chapter 9

The spirit of a modest river of south-west London and a daughter of Mother Thames, returning to the city after her long stay upstream as a hostage of Father Thames's court under the truce Peter helped broker. Her reunion with Peter picks up the unfinished pull between them from the night they met, complicated as ever by the politics of the river families.

First appears in chapter 12

A young woman living around the Skygarden Estate who is plainly not an ordinary resident: a nymph, bound up with the estate's trees and green spaces, unguarded and strange in conversation. Through her Peter starts to see the estate the way its designer might have - as a living system rather than a failed building.

First appears in chapter 15

A Russian practitioner of formidable skill and unsettling calm, trained in the Soviet tradition of battle magic - one of the Night Witches of the Second World War, sustained well beyond a natural lifespan. She has been working in London under an unassuming cover, and her allegiance in the Skygarden affair places her directly across the board from the Folly.