This is the sequel to The Lollipop Man (read my review from earlier this year) and we are reunited with reluctant student investigator Adrian Brown, and his friend Sheila Hargreaves, a TV journalist and co-presenter of Yorkshire Crimetime, a regional TV show featuring local criminal activity.. Adrian’s social life is not exactly glittering, and consists largely of optimistic – but largely disappointing – trips to gay pubs and clubs in mid 1990s Leeds. A recent Yorkshire Crimetime featured the murder of a young gay man, a waiter at a local Italian bistro.

Thanks to a timely intervention by his housemate, Adrian has survived the consequences of one drunken pick-up too many, in the shape of an encounter with a predator called Edmund. Meanwhile, Sheila’s  co-presenter Tony Tranter has gone missing. He is a narcissistic drunk, and has a reputation for unreliability, but this time his absence seems more serious. Then, Tranter’s car is found abandoned under Leeds railway station, bearing signs of a violent struggle. Not long after, his body is found nearby, concealed beside one of the vast Dark Arches above which is the station, and below which the captive River Aire roars and foams. Sheila, fed information by her journalist friend Jeanette Dinsdale, know knows that a scandal was about to break. Tranter was a member of an exclusive and secretive club, where underage girls and boys were provided to provide ‘entertainment’.

The initial, and benevolent, reaction of the TV people is that Tony Tranter was killed in revenge for some criminal who had been brought down as a result of Yorkshire Crimetime’s actions. Sheila suspects differently, but goes along with the initial impetus to record a TV special which will enlist the help of tens of thousands of viewers to bring Tranter’s killer to justice. Adrian, meanwhile, has finally reported his assault to the largely uninterested West Yorkshire Police, concerned

I have tagged this novel as #historicalcrimefiction, but it just doesn’t seem that long ago. I was never an addicted viewer, but Crimewatch was, for a few years a major BBC show. Main presenter, the earnest and clean-cut Nick Ross, with his ‘glamorous assistant’ Sue Cook, purported to solve crimes by presenting re-enactions of crime scenes, and inviting viewers to telephone in with information. It seems bizarre that it lasted as long as it did, and is haunted by the supreme irony that the murder of one of its later presenters, Suzanne Dando, remains one of the great unsolved crimes in British history. Sheila Hargreaves’s show is something similar, and has a huge audience.

It is worth taking a moment to look at Leeds as a crime novel setting. In terms of output, the stories of Chris Nickson take some beating, and he has set his novels in different historical periods, my favourites being the Tom Harper books which follow the Leeds copper from the late Victorian era through to the end of The Great War. In terms of grim and grimy readabiity, the GrandDaddy has to be David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet, set from 1974 to 1983, which pretty much encompassed the era of ‘The Yorkshire Ripper’. My review of two of those books is here.

Back to this novel. Daniel Sellers has Sheila, Adrian, the police (and us) following a series of imaginatively crafted red herrings, until a thrilling finale reveals the truth. This enterprising and addictive thriller will be published by Allison & Busby on 21st August.