The arrival of an assured and exhilarating new voice in literary crime fiction

It's Manchester, July 1996, the month after the IRA bomb, and the Evening News is carrying reports of two murders. On the front page is a glamorous Egyptian woman, a socialite, and heiress to an oil fortune, whose partially clothed body has been found in a basement. In the back pages there is a 50-word piece on the murder of a young prostitute found dumped on a roadside. For Henry Bane, fixer, loanshark and legman for one of Manchester's established ganglords, it's the second piece of news...