What Doesn't Kill Us [Paperback]

It's the eve of the 1980s. Police officer Liz Seeley joins the squad investigating the murders. With a violent boyfriend at home and male chauvinist pigs at work, she is drawn to a feminist collective led by the militant and uncompromising Rowena. There she meets Charmaine—young, Black, artistic, and fighting discrimination on two fronts.

As the list of victims grows and police fail to catch the killer, women are too terrified to go out after dark. To the feminists, the Butcher is a symptom of wider misogyny. Their anger finds an outlet in violence, and Liz is torn between loyalty to them and her colleagues and job.

In this novel based on the true events of the Yorkshire Ripper murders and the feminist arson campaign it triggered targeting porn outlets, Ajay Close combines the tension of a police procedural with the power and passion of the Women's Lib movement. By turns emotional, action-packed, and darkly funny,What Doesn't Kill Usreveals just how much the world has changed since the 1970sand how much it hasn't

That Thursday Liz was on six till two, which meant getting up at five and walking into work. Quicker than waiting for a bus that was late one day in three and some days never came at all. It was the best bit of the day, thirty minutes on her own, with Ian back at the flat dead to the world, and the sun coming up over the Valley Parade floodlights. Most shifts turned out the same – traffic accidents, lost purses, gas meter thefts – but there was always a chance today’s might not. Manningham Lane was on her patch. Every side road you crossed, you got another slice of the view – mills, chimneys, tight-packed terraces, the odd bit of green on the far side if you liked that sort of thlS«