I can remember the time when this book is set – the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper. I was about thirteen years old and used to lie next to the vent for the hot air central heating and listen to the news every night with the ongoing search and the slight feeling of tension as I understood that it wasn’t safe to be outside after dark. That was really the first time that my childhood started to fade at the edges, and much like Miv in the book, my time of roaming free playing with a group of friends in woodlands, along disused railway lines and up in the back fields started to draw to an end.

This is the backdrop to Miv’s story, one where she believes that if she catches or identifies the Ripper she will prevent her father from moving house and she can keep hold of her hard won friends. But this leads to misunderstandings about men and eveyone she and her best friend Sharon look at they find something suspicious – they don’t come from round here, they have brown skin, they behave differently and he has dark hair, he’s a Geordie.

Sharon is more ‘advanced’ than Miv and understands the world and people’s motivations and it is she that draws attention to injustice, racism, violence and all the other secrets that families keep. Miv is niave and collects the information but is unable to make full use of it. We get everything from men ‘tickling’ girls who don’t like it to a drunk vicar and adults who never fully explain things to children. And so the main thrust of this story is a coming-of-age as Miv starts to understand the world and times she lives in.

The balance between the coming-of-age and living in a time before Peter Sutcliffe is caught is well held and Godfrey never veers too far one way or the other. Kerplunk and Hollie Hobby dolls along with anaglypta wall paper and snickets and abandonned mills convey the era and I can almost see the colours of orange and brown and the swirly carpets. But what I could also feel was the tension that lay behind the story of not knowing who this killer was and the way it made everyone consider others differently. And the shock when he was caught. People had known him as a colleague and neighbour the whole time but I doubt that closeness to him offered any relief when he was identified.