The worst mistake an author can do when writing short stories in between a series of novels is to try to “fill in” stuff from the backstory. That is, when creating a universe, good authors know a lot about their world that they never actually write (extensively) about. So for instance, if one of the characters have a classic car, the author may know that the original owner was, say, a pop star in the 60s, but would never mention it in the novel. It’s just background information.
When fishing about for material to use for short stories, the temptation is then to write a short story about that car and that pop star, and that’s always really, really tedious to read.
Fortunately, Aaronovitch avoids making that error. Mostly. Instead, most of these stories are just really entertaining almost stand alone pieces, and you can enjoy them without having read the novels, really. (Although some would be more puzzling than others.)
So… this is good fun, if a bit slight.
Tales from the Folly (2020) by Ben Aaronovitch (buy new, buy used, 4.03 on Goodreads)