Product Description

Nineteen Eighty is set against an evolving backdrop of power, corruption and lies. The nightmare continues during the winter of 1980 when 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 bent coppers and sleaze. After his house is burned down, his wife is threatened and his colleagues turn against him, HunterÂ’s quest becomes personal as he has nothing left to lose. Nineteen Eighty is a compelling battle between two desperate men, each determined to destroy the other. This third volume of the Red Riding Quartet displays PeaceÂ’s unique voice which places him as one of the UKÂ’s finest crime writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2452 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
"'Breathless, extravagant, ultra-violent' Independent on Sunday 'British crime fiction's most exciting new voice in decades' GQ 'Brilliant' The Times 'The pace is relentless, the style staccato-plus and the morality bleak and forlorn... Peace's voice is powerful and unique' Guardian 'Quite simply, this is the future of British crime fiction' Time Out 'A triumph of sustained narrative energy that reinvigorates the British crime novel' Daily Telegraph"

From the Back Cover
‘Set in a world in which black comes in many shades, this powerful, stark and strangely poetic series is turning into a considerable achievement’ Guardian ‘An intense account of an investigation carried out amid mounting public anger as the Ripper kills for the 13th – and final – time’ New Statesman The third novel in David Peace's acclaimed Red Riding Quartet sees Yorkshire terrorised by the Ripper while the corrupt police familiar from 1974 and 1977 continue to prosper. Weaving his own extraordinary fiction around the terrible history of the time, David Peace has once again produced a darkly powerful portrait of a time and a place gone very wrong.

About the Author
David Peace grew up in Yorkshire in the ‘70’s and vividly remembers listening to the hoax tape of the Yorkshire Ripper on his way home from school. He was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 2003. In 2007, he was named GQ Writer of the Year. He lives in Japan.

Customer Reviews

Best yet from Master Peace!
Peace's Red Riding Quartet is rapidly turning from The British Crime Series into the best British Quartet ever, regardless of genre. I have never read anything quite like it. Each book is different from the last and they just get better and better. Nineteen Seventy Four was full on,in yer face Ultra Noir, Seventy Seven was like Dickens imagining Ellroy in an opium dream. And Eighty, well you just want to read the first so-called Transmission. From the British Ellroy to the New Dante in two books. This man is our best writer, period. Read him.

Mixed Views
First, don't expect an easy read. There is, of course a lot of continuous narrative, but a lot of the effect is obtained by disjunction. I found a lot of that contrived and it is derivative not original. Second, the main plot (the Sutcliffe murders lightly disguised mainly by using different names) has a known outcome, but that is by no means an unusual device, nor is it here ineffective here, but it is the sub-plots and the characterisations that make the books worthwhile. The tension is well maintained and there are some neat touches: juxtapositions of 'Sutcliffe's' thoughts with the main narrative, Molly Bloom like soliloquy (though that did irritate me a bit since David Peace is no James Joyce). But I have to say that a lot of the writing struck me as obfuscation in the guise of literary depth and it just didn't come off. Overall worth reading, but I thought it didn't live up to the hype. There is another irritation - the typefaces are a mess. They are set that way deliberately (I think!) to signal different types of pace and atmosphere, but it did not work at all for me.

Another superb episode of Peace's "Red Riding" quartet
David Peace's hallucinatory, horrific Yorkshire crime novels become darker and deeper by the volume. His psychological landscape is dominated by the Yorkshire Ripper, who terrorised the North of England through the late seventies and early eighties; Peace shows the police hunting him to be only half a step less psychologically damaged than the man they're trying to find.

Uncomfortable, disturbing, chilling reading, in a fragmented, fractured style. Hieronymous Bosch meets James Ellroy somewhere off the M62. Memorable and terrifying.