Red Riding Quartet
4 primary works • 8 total works
Book 1
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.
Book 2
Leeds. Sunday 29 May 1977. It's happening again ...Three years after the Strafford Shootings and little has changed in the dark world of west Yorkshire. Prostitutes are being murdered with grim regularity. Bob Fraser is a half-way decent copper in a police force as corrupt as it is brutal. Jack Whitehead is a burned out hack in perpetual self-torment after the Exorcist killings. Both men are struggling to control their desperate infatuations with Chapeltown whores. When the two sevens clash ...As the burning summer gives way to the bonfires of Jubilee Night, Fraser begins to suspect that the Yorkshire Ripper isn't the only killer in town. Whitehead is the only other man who even cares.
Book 3
Winter, 1980. The Yorkshire Ripper has just claimed his thirteenth victim. Ripper thirteen, police nil. As public anger against the police mounts, Assistant Chief Constable Peter Hunter is sent to take over the investigation. The Strafford Shootings remain unsolved, and the murders of the Jubilee summer of 1977 are still attributed to the Ripper. But Hunter soon realises that all is not as it seems - and that the police are more heavily implicated in the killings than anyone could have imagined. Jack Whitehead, alone and mad in a mental institution after trying to exorcise the demons from his head with hammer and nail, appears to hold the key. What is the connection between the Ripper and this fresh spate of violence? And what will happen when these men's separate hells collide?
Book 4
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.
Third in a series of unique but connected thrillers set against an evolving backdrop of immense social change. The noir nightmare continues during the harsh winter of 1980. The Ripper murders his thirteenth 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 corruption and sleaze. After his house is burned down, his wife?s life is threatened and his colleagues turn against him, Hunter?s quest becomes personal as he is left with nothing more to lose. Nineteen Eighty i s a compelling battle between two desperate men, each determined to destroy the other. The latest dark Yorkshire journey confirms Peace?s reputation as one of the most talented contemporary crime writers.
Nineteen Eighty Three's three intertwining storylines see the Quartet's central themes of corruption and the perversion of justice come to a head as BJ, the rent boy from Nineteen Seventy Four, the lawyer Big John Piggott - who's as near as you get to a hero in Peace's world - and Maurice Jobson, the senior cop whose career of corruption and brutality has set all this in motion, find themselves on a collision course that can only end in a terrible vengeance.
Nineteen Eighty Three is an epic tale which concluded an extraordinary body of work confirming Peace as the most innovative and remarkable new British crime writer to have emerged for years.
Nineteen Eighty Three is an epic tale which concluded an extraordinary body of work confirming Peace as the most innovative and remarkable new British crime writer to have emerged for years.
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.
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.
Jeanette Garland, missing Castleford, July 1969. Susan Ridyard, missing Rochdale, March 1972. Claire Kemplay, missing Morley, since yesterday. Christmas bombs and Lord Lucan on the run, Leeds United and the Bay City Rollers, The Exorcist and It Ain't Half Hot Mum.
It's winter, 1974, Yorkshire, 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.
In Nineteen Seventy Four, David Peace brings the passion and stylistic bravado of an Ellroy novel to this terrifyingly intense journey into a secret history of sexual obsession and greed, and starts a highly acclaimed crime series that has redefined how the genre is approached.
It's winter, 1974, Yorkshire, 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.
In Nineteen Seventy Four, David Peace brings the passion and stylistic bravado of an Ellroy novel to this terrifyingly intense journey into a secret history of sexual obsession and greed, and starts a highly acclaimed crime series that has redefined how the genre is approached.