Some of the most vibrant and varied crime writing around anywhere is centred on the evocative industrial fishing port of Hull, with its shadowy wind-swept streets, its hard-bitten attitudes, its drugs, its gangsters and yet its underlying humanity that clings like untended weeds amid the cracks of the endemic poverty and the violence. And Alfie Robins’ ‘Reprisal’ is an outstanding example of the genre, a classic police procedural where you can hear the streets, smell the weather, savour the taciturn banter, and feel the four inch nail being driven into the heads of victims by a vengeful, meticulous and psychotic serial killer. This is a criminal environment as real as it gets, and this is how people die if DCI Philip Marlowe and his over-stretched, tight-knit team don’t get there first.