Red Riding Quartet

Jeanette Garland, missing Castleford, July 1969. Susan Ridyard, missing Rochdale, March 1972. Claire Kemplay, missing Morley, since yesterday. It’s winter, 1974, Yorkshire, Christmas bombs, Lord Lucan on the run, the Bay City Rollers, and Eddie Dunford’s got the job he wanted – crime correspondent for the Yorkshire Evening Post. He didn’t know it was going to be a season in hell. A dead little girl with a swan’s wings stitched into her back. A gypsy camp in a ring of fire. Corruption everywhere you look.

If you thought fiction couldn't get darker then think again. Nineteen Seventy Seven, the second instalment of the Red Riding Quartet, is one long nightmare.Its heroes - the half decent copper Bob Fraser and the burnt-out hack Jack Whitehead - would be considered villains in most people's books.

The nightmare continues during the winter of 1980 when the Ripper murders his 13th victim and the whole of Yorkshire is terrorised. Assistant Chief Constable Hunter struggles to solve the hellish crimes and bring an end to the horror, but is drawn ever deeper into a world of bent coppers and sleaze. After his house is burned down, his wife is threatened and his colleagues turn against him, Hunter’s quest becomes personal as he has nothing left to lose.

The fourth and Final Instalment in the Red Riding Quartet. With Nineteen Eighty Three, David Peace completes the Red Riding Quartet, an astonishing, sustained epic. Three intertwining storylines see the Quartet’s central themes of corruption and the perversion of justice come to a head.