David Peace is a British author born in Ossett, West Yorkshire in 1967.
His works include the "Red-Riding Quartet" (set against a backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, and GB84, set against the UK miners' strike (1984-1985). He now lives in Tokyo, Japan, with his family.
The Red-Riding Quartet features several recurring characters such as Eddie Dunford, George Oldman, Jack Whitehead and BJ.
Works
"Nineteen Seventy Four" - The first novel in the quartet deals with the murder and mutilation of several missing young girls. Crime journalist Eddie Dunford discovers what he believes is a link between the murders and corruption within the West Yorkshire Police Force.
"Nineteen Seventy Seven" - Three years after the chilling end of Nineteen Seventy Four, the continuing murder of prostitutes is making the headlines. Two characters from the previous novel inter-twine their stories, as Jack Whitehead of the Yorkshire Post, and Policeman Bob Fraser get involved in something that threatens their very existence.
"Nineteen Eighty" - With the Ripper seemingly unstoppable, the Home Office bring in a specially set-up team to bring him to justice. However as Peter Hunter heads up the team, he starts to find out things he wishes he hadn't.
"Nineteen Eighty Three" - Hazel Atkins, ten years old, goes missing in Morley. The circumstances, down to her primary school, identical to those of the abduction of Clare Kemplay in December 1974. When Jimmy Ashworth, the boy who found Kemplay's body, hangs himself in police custody under suspicion of Atkins' abduction, John Piggott, erstwhile solicitor to Sergeant Fraser and now saddled with the job of conducting Michael Myshkin's appeal against his conviction for Kemplay's murder, begins to discover that the parallels between the two cases run far deeper. As well as Piggott, this astonishing novel presents - in strictly alternating chapters divided into five sections - both Chief Superintendent Maurice Jobson, first as he handles the search for Atkins, and then through his prior involvment in the three earlier missing girl cases linked by Eddie Dunford in the first novel of the series; and BJ, from his flight from the shootings on Xmas Eve, 1974, at the Strafford Arms (ie the very end of the first novel in the series), through Clare Strachan's murder and some strange intersections with some of events of the second and third novels of the series, to the dark days of June 1983 and the street where he grew up alongside Myshkin, Ashworth and Piggott. Although this may sound confusing it is written with consummate skill, and this novel is essential reading for anyone who has read the previous books in the “Red-Riding Quartet”.
"GB84" A novel presenting the Miner's Strike in several conflicting and overlapping narratives. The stories of two of the strikers, written and printed in a kind of diary-of-consciousness form, are used to frame the rapidly alternating accounts of Terry Winter, the chief executive officer of the NUM; Neil Fontaine, a spook who is acting as chauffeur to Stephen Sweet, a millionaire strike-breaking businessman; and Dave Johnson, aka The Mechanic, who carries out the dirty work of the security services and the government. (The characters of Winter and Sweet are evidently inspired by Roger Windsor and David Hart). Scargill appears close-up as The President. The narrative allows Thatcher to appear only at a distance - an intriguing collusion with her government's official line of non-involvement in the dispute.