Red Riding Nineteen Seventy Seven by David Peace
1977 - the year the two sevens clash - the year of punk - the year of the Yorkshire Ripper and the Silver Jubilee No more heroes in 1977, just an urban wasteland where bad men do bad things and get away with them again and again and again. If you thought fiction couldn't get darker then David Peace's extraordinary debut, 1974, then think again. 1977, the second part of his Yorkshire Quartet is one long noir nightmare. Its heroes - the half-way decent copper Bob Fraser and the burnt-out feral 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 whores. 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.