David Peace’s astringent novels inhabit the borderland between genre and mainstream fiction. His work includes the Red Riding Quartet and GB84 (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). Like its predecessors, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) is precisely grounded in its historical context — in this case Tokyo in August 1946, a year on from the Japanese surrender. The first of a projected trilogy, the novel deals with the murder of two young geishas strangled with their own shawls. Detective Minami of the beleaguered Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department is assigned the investigation, a task he accepts with what proves to be well-founded reluctance. The Department itself is in crisis, its personnel living in fear of another purge by the occupying authorities.

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