Nineteen Eighty Three

With Nineteen Eighty Three David Peace completes his Red Riding Quartet, an astonishingly sustained epic of Yorkshire noir. Nineteen Eighty Three’s three intertwining storylines see the Quartet’s central themes of corruption and the perversion of justice come to a head: BJ the rent boy from Nineteen Seventy Four, the lawyer Big John Pigott, 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 a fitting conclusion for one of the finest series in contemporary British crime writing.