Turning Blue

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Turning Blue by Benjamin Myers, read by Andrew Macintosh.

‘Ben Myers is the master of English rural noir, and with Turning Blue, he has created a whole new genre: folk crime … this is by turns gripping, ghastly and unputdownable’ PAUL KINGSNORTH

In the depths of winter in an isolated Yorkshire hamlet, a teenage girl, Melanie Muncy, is missing.

The elite detective unit Cold Storage dispatches its best man to investigate. DI Jim Brindle may be obsessive, taciturn and solitary, but nobody on the force is more relentless in pursuing justice. Local journalist Roddy Mace has sacrificed a high-flying career as a reporter in London to take up a role with the local newspaper. For him the Muncy case offers the chance of redemption.

Darker forces are at work than either man has realised. On a farm high above the hamlet, Steven Rutter, a destitute loner, harbours secrets that will shock even the hardened Brindle. Nobody knows the bleak moors and their hiding places better than him.

As Brindle and Mace begin to prise the secrets of the case from the tight-lipped locals, their investigation leads first to the pillars of the community and finally to a local celebrity who has his own hiding places, and his own dark tastes.

Critics Review

Myers summons up the Yorkshire landscape with lyrical aplomb. The bleakness of the snowbound landscape, the beauty of the moors, the vivid realisation of market town and northern city are all rendered with absolute clarity. His prose is beautifully controlled and so graphic it’s impossible not to picture the scenes he conjures up in striking detail. There is no hiding place from the darkness because the writing is so damned good
GUARDIAN
Working within the genre of crime fiction, and yet with a prose style that at times reads like poetry, Myers spins a tale of torment that creaks into other, older narratives. He creates a novel that is both environmentally and ecologically prescient … Turning Blue is a brave and utterly uncompromising novel which positions Benjamin Myers alongside the great names of crime fiction. He has earned his metaphorical seat on the bench, snuggled in between Val McDermid and James Ellroy
CAUGHT BY THE RIVER
A queasily compulsive evocation of a wild and brutal Yorkshire landscape, informed and haunted in equal measure by the shades of Jimmy Savile and his monstrous deeds and the East Riding’s lost boy of crime fiction, Ted Lewis
CATHI UNSWORTH
[Myers is] grammatically armed, experienced, and capable of subverting language to dangerous effect….In terms of the current pantheon of crime writing, there truly is nothing with Turning Blue’s dark power and literary ferocity
THRILL FILTER
Myers has his own style, he is an exciting writer of extraordinary talent with an ability to weave heart-breaking tales about marginalised communities and individuals with brutal, bleak and stomach-wrenching stories into the evocative tapestry of a landscape setting … I am continually excited and blown away by Myers’ awesome writing
A FICTION HABIT
Not only has Myers managed to retain his genuine gift for writing about the countryside – despite some quite explicit diversions into the sexual underworld – but in James Brindle he has created a detective who is troubled, and thankfully not just by the tired clichés of drink, drugs or divorce … Turning Blue works as a proper old-fashioned page turner, but Myers has created a new genre – Dales Noir – with echoes of a great like James Ellroy
LOUDER THAN WAR
Turning Blue is cool, dark and hypnotic. As we’ve come to expect from Myers, landscape and nature play an important role in the book, providing the rough-hewn canvas on which he paints yet another gripping, shadowy portrait of humanity, and in the process proves himself one of our most interesting and original writers
LOUD & QUIET
This is far removed from the picture postcard Yorkshire of Heartbeat … the wildness of the environs are particularly well drawn, the reek of sheep shit practically wafting off the page…this compulsively readable work is driven by the same kind of grimly hypnotic thump that David Peace brought to his Red Riding Quartet (another author not given to romanticising “the north”
THE CRACK
The writing is masterful. The descriptive power throughout is akin to that of the best metaphysical poetry….to read Turning Blue is to be totally immersed, to be so engaged with the richness of the text that when reality calls and the book needs placing back on the table, you long to escape back to it
NUDGE
Rural crime fiction in Britain is often hounded by a sense of cosiness, of layers of geniality laid as thick as a buttered scone. Trust Benjamin Myers to swallow those clichés into oblivion, and regurgitate a dark, nasty detective story set in the Yorkshire dales, with barely an iota of compassion for our methods of clinging to what we know … this is a tour de force of stark horror writhing from any pigeonhole you lump it in
THE SKINNY
What a revelation Turning Blue turned out to be. A glorious mash up of the staccato darkness of David Peace, fused with Ross Raisin, this book was not only utterly original, but infused with a beautifully realised balance of naturalistic imagery, and a totally compelling tale of sordid murder in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales. Drawing on the theme of the infamous Yew Tree investigations, Myers has conjured up a cast of emotionally damaged characters across the spectrum, with blood chilling moments of revelation, that will haunt your dreams
RAVEN CRIME READS
Deeply uncomfortable, essential reading, examining something very rotten in British society
UNSUNG STORIES

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