Red Riding Nineteen Seventy Seven

David Peace's acclaimed Red Riding Quartet continues with this exhilarating follow-up to Nineteen Seventy-Four. It's summer in Leeds and the city is anxiously awaiting the Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth's reign. Detective Bob Fraser and Jack Whitehead, a reporter at the Post, however, have other things on their minds-mainly the fact that someone is murdering prostitutes. The killer is quickly dubbed the “Yorkshire Ripper” and each man, on their own, works tirelessly to catch him. But their investigations turn grisly as they each engage in affairs with the prostitutes they are supposedly protecting. As the summer progresses, the killings accelerate and it seems as if Fraser and Whitehead are the only men who suspect or care that there may be more than one killer at large.

The first installment of David Peace's electrifying Red Riding Quartet vividly brings to life a gritty, dangerous working class city tormented by a series of brutal murders. Nineteen Seventy-Four follows Eddie Dunford, the newly minted crime correspondent for the Yorkshire Post. His first story is about Clare Kemplay, a young girl recently found brutally murdered. While the police department and other crime reporters at the newspaper believe it's an isolated incident, Eddie finds a pattern between Clare's disappearance and those of other girls from a few years earlier. Despite his better judgment, and against the advice of others, he starts to dig deep. What he finds is a nightmare of corruption, violence, blackmail, and obsession that ultimately leads to a shocking, explosive conclusion.

Continuing the narrative begun with Nineteen Seventy-Four and Nineteen Seventy-Seven, this electrifying third installment of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet demonstrates a skill that goes above and beyond the limits of the genre. While Yorkshire is terrorized by the Ripper, the corrupt police continue to prosper. To give the case some new life, Peter Hunter, a “clean” cop from nearby Manchester, is brought in to offer a fresh perspective. As he goes about setting up a new case under the radar, he suffers the same fate as those who previously attempted to get in the way of the Ripper: his house is burned down, his wife threatened. But he soldiers on. And as he comes face to face with unthinkable evil, Hunter struggles to maintain his reputation, his sanity, and his life.

If you thought fiction couldn't get darker than David Peace's extraordinary debut, Nineteen Seventy Four, 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. Fraser and Whitehead have one thing in common though, they're both desperate men dangerously in love with Chapeltown prostitutes. And as the summer moves remorselessly towards the bonfires of Jubilee Night, the killings accelerate and it seems as if Fraser and Whitehead are the only men who suspect or care that there may be more than one killer at large. Out of the horror of true crime, David Peace has fashioned a work of terrible beauty. Like James Ellroy before him, David Peace tells us the true and fearsome secret history of our times.

In Nineteen Eighty-Three, David Peace brings his astonishing series of riveting, gritty crime novels to a shocking conclusion. With three separate narrators whose paths are on a collision course, Peace makes a dark study of perverted justice, retribution, and urban decay. Maurice Jobson is a Yorkshire cop whose greed and corruption has rotted the police force to the core; BJ is a local street thug who finds he can no longer safely lurk in the shadows; and John Piggott, a lawyer, is as honest and forthright as they come. His investigation of a long-cold murder might just be the cure for Yorkshire’s woes, but he’ll need to get through it alive first.

'Brilliant.' New York Times 'Remarkable.' Irish Times August 1946. One year on from surrender and Tokyo lies broken and bleeding at the feet of its American victors. Against this extraordinary historical backdrop, Tokyo Year Zero opens with the discovery of the bodies of two young women in Shiba Park. Against his wishes, Detective Minami is assigned to the case; as he gets drawn ever deeper into these complex and horrific murders, he realises that his own past and secrets are indelibly linked to those of the dead women and their killer. 'A feat of prodigious and intense imagination.' The Times 'A chilling tale of murder, corruption and post-war devastation.' Observer Books of the Year 'Part historical stunner, part Kurosawa crime film, an original all the way.' James Ellroy

Stylish, riveting and appalling, GB84 is a shocking fictional documentation of the violence, sleaze and fraudulence that characterised Thatcher's Britain. Great Britain. 1984. The miners' strike. It is the closest Britain has come to civil war in fifty years, setting the government against the people. In his trademark visceral prose, Peace describes the insidious workings of the boardroom negotiations and the increasingly anarchic coalfield battles; the struggle for influence in government and the dwindling powers of the NUM; and the corruption, intrigue and dirty tricks which run through the whole like a fault in a seam of coal. David Peace has written a novel extraordinary in its reach, and unflinching in its capacity to recreate the brutality and passion that changed the course of British history in the late twentieth century. 'A genuine British original.' Guardian 'Peace is a writer of such immense talent and power . . . If Northern noir is the crime fashion of the moment, Peace is its most brilliant designer.' The Times

A New York Times Editors' Choice "[T]he stuff of great literature." —The New York Times | "Red or Dead is a winner." —The Washington Post The place where the swinging sixties started – Liverpool, England, birthplace of the Beatles – wasn’t so swinging. Amid industrial blight and a bad economy, the port town’s shipping industry was going bust and there was widespread unemployment, with no assistance from a government tightening its belt. Even the Beatles moved to London. Into these hard times walked Bill Shankly, a former Scottish coal miner who took over the city’s perpetually last-place soccer team. He had a straightforward work ethic and a favorite song – a silly pop song done by a local band, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Soon he would have entire stadiums singing along, tens of thousands of people all dressed in the team color red . . . as Liverpool began to win . . . And soon, too, there was something else those thousands of people would chant as one: Shank-lee, Shank-lee . . . In Red or Dead, the acclaimed writer David Peace tells the stirring story of the real-life working-class hero who lifted the spirits of an entire city in turbulent times. But Red or Dead is more than a fictional biography of a real man, and more than a thrilling novel about sports. It is an epic novel that transcends those categories, until there’s nothing left to call it but – as many of the world’s leading newspapers already have – a masterpiece.