1977

“Peace’s policemen rape prostitutes they are meant to be protecting, torture suspects they know cannot be guilty and reap the profits of organized vice. Peace’s powerful novel exposes a side of life which most of us would prefer to ignore.” – Daily Mail “A writer of immense talent and power… If northern noir is the crime fashion of the moment, Peace is its most brilliant designer.” – The Times (London) “Peace has found his own voice-full of dazzling, intense poetry and visceral violence.” – Uncut “With a human landscape that is violent and unrelentingly bleak, Peace’s fiction is two or three shades the other side of noir.” – New Statesman “Nineteen Seventy-Seven smacks of the stinking corruption of a brutal police force and a formidable sense of time and place.” Second in the "Red Riding Quartet", this tale is set in Jubilee year. Its heroes, the half-decent copper Bof Fraser and the burnt-out hack Jack Whitehead are the only two who suspect that there is more than one killer at large among the Chapeltown whores.