David Peace was born in Dewsbury and his Red Riding quartet of novels centre around the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. For six years until 1980 women in West Yorksire, and beyond, lived in constant fear of attack. The advice from the police was to stay at home after dark.

It is becoming commonplace to describe British novels as Ellroy-esque but, in these novels, the West Yorkshire of the 1970s is shown to be just as sordid as James Ellroy's picture of Los Angeles in the 1940s and 1950s. Like Ellroy, Peace believes crime should be treated very seriously, to be shown to have horrific consequences and may not be confined to the criminals. Like Ellroy, Peace constructs his fiction around real events and, like Ellroy, he does not use straightforward narrative.

Each novel takes a clearly defined period of time and is told from the point of view of different characters. These include a journalist, a rent boy, an unsuccessful solicitor and a series of corrupt, and not so corrupt, cops. Ultimately for all of these characters there is no way out.

Although written in a very different style from most conventional crime stories the Red Riding Quartet moves at a terrific pace and it is certainly difficult to put them down. Having set off to review 1977 and 1980 this reviewer had to rush out to buy 1983 to see how all the threads of the ongoing plot would finely be pulled together.

The novels deal with material that is usually unpleasant and always thought-provoking but it is Peace's unique voice that probably accounts for his inclusion in Granta's list of young authors, firmly establishing him as a serious writer. He manipulates language in ways more usually employed in poetry than prose and yet his work never loses its terrific pace.

Peace also shows a very strong sense of place. West Yorkshire readers will have little trouble recognising the parts of Leeds, Wakefield and Bradford featured and many of the pubs and, of course, Millgarth police station are still around.

My only problem with these novels is the more general point of the extent to which you can merge fact and fiction, The Red Riding Quartet focuses on real crimes which happened relatively recently although the names of the victims have been changed.

Reviewed by Chris Verguson