Freedom Read #102

Yorkshire-noir (Yorkie-noir!?) or “Folk Crime”, as someone on the back cover has it.

You don’t need to go the far reaches of Scandinavia to hear dark tales of murder, dismemberment, dodgy coppers, ‘idiosyncratic’ coppers, young women victims, foul weather, treacherous landscapes, snuff movies, strange hermit-types as the ‘main suspect’, the “we don’t like outsiders meddling in our affairs” village mentality…its all here in the northern Yorkshire Dales. And pigs. Yeah, the pigs are important.

There’s also a Jimmy Saville proxy.

I really like Ben Myers as an author: Beastings, Pig Iron, The Offing and Gallows Pole are excellent novels. This is a different style of book, a less literary, more straight-forward thriller and there’s nothing wrong with that.

It is the fug of old wood-smoke and sweat and layer upon layer of clothing congealing into one mass; the smell of dried urine and soil and semen and moss and mildew and rotting teeth and bleeding gums. It is the smell of rotten human flesh and putrefying skin and death gases and decomposition clinging to a physical form. It is Steve Rutter.

Excellent.