ORIGINAL SKIN

There’s a killer on the loose in Hull, one with a taste for extreme violence. A killer who might be working for the local drug barons or a misfit seeking instant notoriety; either way it spells trouble for DS Aector McAvoy as he finds himself in the way as policing, politics and pleasure seeking collide.

If producing a second novel is a hurdle, and it is for most authors, then David Mark has cleared it like an Olympic champion.

This complex, multi layered novel delivers all the action you would expect from the work of a top rank thriller writer. David Mark manages to combine this with an exploration of family ties and the bleak place to which the constant search for pleasure through sensation can take an individual.

All of this is delivered in a prose style that captures the gallows humour, rivalries and loyalties inherent to life in the police force and the uniquely grim character of Hull with consummate ease.

There are more ideas and inventiveness in a single novel by David Mark than in a whole library of books by most of his contemporaries in and out of the crime genre. Along with Tom Benn he represents a confident and distinctive strand within British crime writing that promises great things for the future.