Well...that was bloody grim.
Eddie Dunford is the crime reporter for the Yorkshire Evening Post when a little girl is found brutally murdered with swan's wings stitched into her back, and his colleague, chasing a story on corruption involving prominent local businessmen and public figures, winds up dead.
Chasing the link between the two, Dunford is soon drawn ever deeper into a brutal and corrupt work of casual racism and violence, in which children wind up dead and their murderers protected, a brutal police force acts as heavies for private interests, and absolutely nobody is clean.
Incredibly bleak and depressing, I nonetheless found this compelling, especially once I had an opportunity to read uninterrupted for longer than 10 minutes, and the stream of consciousness written style, which I'd initially found jarring, worked more for me as the story progressed and Dunford became increasingly desperate. However, this approach also meant that the climax left with with a slightly vague notion of who had done what and why, although it's entirely possible that that's more my fault than the author's.
I will come back to see how this quartet progresses, but it'll definitely be after I've dabbled in the shallower, lighter end for a while...
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