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 obession and greed, and starts a highly acclaimed crime series that has redefined how the genre is approached.

The slow-burning, word-of-mouth success story of British publishing... These four books recreated the pervasive sense of terror and corruption with a hammering, semi-magical style loosely reminiscent of James Ellroy, but steeped in something far more bleak and English... the evil twin of Life On Mars... Peace may have succeeded in creating an enduring literature for a curiously undocumented area of Britain -- Justin Quirk * Guardian Guide *
Bleakly brilliant * Radio Times *
Compelling * Sunday Times *
He's in a class of his own in terms of ambition. He's trying to write these alternative histories of events we know quite well in a challenging way. The fact that he's dealing with very English subjects from Japan is very interesting -- Alex Clark * editor of Granta Magazine *
A British crime master work. Required reading... * Maxim *
Original, difficult, brilliant * Observer *
Haunting evocations of 70s and 80s Yorkshire - interlinking tales of very fallible coppers, very noir hacks, very human killers -- Euan Ferguson * Observer *
Singular and memorable -- Ian Jack * Guardian *

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.