Detective Inspector Archie LeBrock of Scotland Yard is a badger. He is also a very good policeman, handy with his fists and permanently annoyed by the fact that Britain has only lately won independence from a French empire whose capital, Paris, everyone calls Grandville. His sidekick is a rat. The villains are not always animals, but they are always nastier than the animals.
Talbot drew on the nineteenth-century French illustrator J.J. Grandville, who drew animals dressed as people, and the result is steampunk in its most detailed form: airships, automatons, gaslight and fine tailoring, with a Sherlockian plot running through each of the five books. It looks like a children's book and very much isn't one, which is part of the fun, and a lot of the shock.
