There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of policing memoir. There is the frank, warts-and-all procedural. Written or dictated by recently retired murder detectives or half-disgraced Met commissioners, they offer an insider’s account of the disquieting realities of life on the job. At their most compelling, as with Good Cop, Bad War, Neil Woods’s 2016 account of his time undercover in Brighton’s drug trade, they provide a glimpse into otherwise closed worlds – places many of us mercifully have nothing much to do with most of the time. Such books veer from the adrenalised to the formulaic at a moment’s notice. Their pleasures are predictable.

The second kind of memoir is more understated. If the world can be a desperate place, its authors suggest, there is no need to make it worse by resorting to platitudes and self-pity. Things can be communicated as they are. Stories should be allowed to speak for themselves. These books