If you thought fiction couldn’t get darker than David Peace’s extraordinary debut, Nineteen Seventy Four, then think again. Nineteen Seventy Seven, the second instalment of the Red Riding Quartet, is one long nightmare. Its heroes – the half decent copper Bob Fraser and the burnt-out hack Jack Whitehead – would be considered villains in most people’s books.

Fraser and Whitehead have one thing in common though, they’re both desperate men dangerously in love with Chapeltown prostitutes. And as the summer moves remorselessly towards the bonfires of Jubilee Night, the killings accelerate and it seems as if Fraser and Whitehead are the only men who suspect or care that there may be more than one killer at large. Out of the horror of true crime, David Peace has fashioned a work of terrible beauty.

Like James Ellroy before him, David Peace tells us the true and fearsome secret history of our times.