Nineteen Seventy-Four (Red Riding Quartet Series #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.

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.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.

The first volume in Peace's Red Riding Quartet, a grim whodunit noir, will remind many of the bleak, violent work of James Ellroy. In 1974, Eddie Dunford has just been named crime correspondent for the Yorkshire Post. His first major assignment coincides with the death of his father, but his professional ambitions trump his family obligations. The case he's covering involves the disappearance of 10-year-old Clare Kemplay. When Dunford's digging unearths some similar unsolved cases, neither his editor nor the police welcome his efforts. After Kemplay's strangled and mutilated corpse turns up, an unknown source supplies Dunford with leads suggesting that some prominent officials and businessmen may be implicated in the crime. The staccato, choppy prose is a perfect mechanism for conveying Dunford's frenetic approach to his life and work. Peace (Tokyo Year Zero) doesn't pull any punches, and his uncompromising portrayal of his dark and conflicted protagonist will appeal to those who like their mean streets to be really mean.
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David Peace is the author of The Red Riding Quartet, GB84,The Damned Utd and Tokyo Year Zero. He was chosen as one of Granta's 2003 Best Young British Novelists, and has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the German Crime Fiction Award, and the French Grand Prix de Roman Noir for Best Foreign Novel. Born and raised in Yorkshire, he has lived in Tokyo since 1994.