Airedale by Dylan Byford

Outside London, it's pretty rare to find English sci-fi set in a real place. I can think of one or two set in Manchester, and Peter F Hamilton's Greg Mandel series set in and around Rutland, but beyond that I'm struggling. It's fair to say I was intrigued when I spotted one of the first novels from new crime publisher Northodox Press was 'a near-future thriller' set in a place I used to live: Airedale.

If you're a dog-lover you might be familiar with the terrier of the same name, but I'm guessing that outside Yorkshire (probably even inside most of Yorkshire) the name won't conjure up a place for you. As you might have guessed, it's the dale (valley) where the River Aire runs, and these days houses Leeds commuters, many of them living in buildings that forty years ago were textile mills. There is also a UNESCO world heritage site, the mill village Saltaire. Dylan Byford has cleverly taken this geography and history and extrapolated it into a messy future. An unspecified time when another industry is disintegrating in the periodically flooded dale leaving empty warehouses and unemployment, Saltaire exists in a protective bubble, and northern politicians look to Durham rather than Westminster.

Airedale is a cyberpunk police procedural featuring politics, subversion, riots and local businessmen. It's full of wonderful details of integrated technology and state surveillance, what's changed and what hasn't. Haz Edmundson is a contractor working for the police, what we might call a forensic computing expert who doesn't usually have to deal with dead bodies. Except tonight, when for one reason or another he's there when the body of an activist is discovered and he can't let it go when it's officially marked as an accidental death. How far is he prepared to go to uncover the truth? And who can he trust?

Haz is a wonderfully human character. A hopeless, unreliable, scruffy single dad who's good at his job but not hard-boiled enough to deal with death in a detached way. He's also apt to ask the wrong questions at the wrong moment, and land himself in trouble. I would happily read more books about him. If he can hang onto his life or his job long enough to star in them. There were a couple of interesting strands that weren't fully followed up, in my view, and I don't claim to completely understand the conclusions but I had a fabulous time along the way. Except for the bit near the start that's really not for the arachnophobes (grit your teeth and race through it, it's only half a dozen pages and only one of them is horrifying).

I didn't pay for my copy because I won it in a draw on Twitter but other than them once reading (and rejecting) the manuscript of a crime novel of mine set in Newcastle, I have no relationship with Northodox and I don't know Dylan Byford either. If you like William Gibson but have always wished someone would write in a similar vein but with uncool characters in small town Yorkshire (it can't just be me), you are definitely onto a winner here. Similarly if you enjoyed the Greg Mandel series from Peter F Hamilton (I reviewed the first and second books a few years ago), or if you're a fan of British police procedurals and you have an open mind on the SF elements. It does have a great sense of place, and I was initially attracted to it because of the setting, but I was hooked from the first page and the setting soon became the icing on a fine cake. Highly recommended, whether you know where Airedale is or not.

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