Red Riding Nineteen Eighty Three: Red Riding Quartet [Kindle Edition]

All four books are violent and disturbing outings. Peace's characters are cruel, selfish and self-loathing creations that stay with the reader long after the book is finished.

1983 is the final part of the quartet and should only be read after completing the first three. This isn't the type of series you can miss bits out of.

As usual the plot is tense and draws the reader in. The kind of book that takes one long sitting, it is very hard to put down. Indeed, due to the breakneck pace of Peace's startling prose, it is often impossible to withdraw from the narrative at all.

This novel is the strongest of the four, utillising a tight yet intricate structure, thrusting the reader back and forth across the decades revealing startling truths about the characters, many of whom are familiar from earlier in the series.

Indeed, many of the images used here are also familiar from earlier giving the reader a sense of a claustrophobic communal nightmare.

If you've never read any David Peace, I suggest starting with the superb 1974 and working your way through. If you've already read the first three books, you need to read this. But then you know that already.

His series of novels set in and around Leeds at the time of the Yorkshire Ripper murders is in my view the finest modern British series in crime fiction. Dark, desperate, highly stylised, moving, they engage with modern Britain - drawing on a number of topical themes: abuse; corruption; conspiracy.

This the final novel in the quartet revisits many of the threads initiated in 1974, but are presented in such a way that knowledge of the previous novels is not necessary.

The three principals here: BJ, a rent boy, Piggot, a corrupt solicitor, and Jobson, a corrupt policeman, are set in three different interlinking narratives. In demonstrating how his style has developed since his earlier work, here various devices are used effortlessly. Piggot's chapters are written in the second person, BJ refers to himself continually in the third person. The device differentiates the narrative threads, but also serves to demonstrate the distancing each character has from their story.

The characters are all too human, complex people with complex motivations. Violence is presented explictly, the consequences of actions explored (throughout the whole of the twenty five year span covered by the novel).

The subject matter - violent child murders and abuse - may be too much for some. The writing style may be too much for others. BUt make no mistake, David Peace is the most exciting and most important thing that has happened to crime fiction in the UK in a very long time.