I really really wanted to love this book. 

Focusing on a career criminal called Neil Adamson and the appalling events of one particular night in 1970 when two men (a nightwatchman and a police officer) ended up dead in the course of their work, it had two particular points of interest for me. 

Firstly, it’s set in Farsley which is just down the street from where I live. That alone would make me want to read, but more pertinently, my policeman Grandad was involved in the hunt for Neil after the murders took place. And not only that, but he had been stabbed previously by the same man, so it feels like a very personal story to me, and one that was already quite familiar. 

But I just couldn’t love the book unfortunately. It was clearly well researched and contained lots of personal details contributed by the families of the people involved in the story, but the writing style just felt a bit amateur for me - at times it read more like a good school report than a book. Sometimes I had to read a sentence a few times to get the proper meaning, and there were times when the structure of what was written just felt a bit jarring. Things like ‘at approximately ‘x time’, followed two sentences later by ‘two minutes later, at exactly x time’. It just broke my head a little bit. 

It definitely brought extra depth to the details of the story that I knew, and that personal touch from others involved was great and I loved seeing the pictures that had been included. It was a fast-paced read and I read it in two sittings because I had that personal investment - every time I saw my Grandad’s name in print it was like a little thrill. 

While the writing style wasn’t for me, that’s not necessarily to say it wouldn’t be perfect for someone else, so if you’d like a fast-paced piece of local history, I’d still recommend it as a good read to learn a little something.