About


Welcome to the official website of David Young, author of the Stasi series of crime thrillers and the new standalone WW2 thriller DEATH IN BLITZ CITY, set in Hull in 1942.

The new novel will be published in paperback, e-book and audiobook formats on July 7th, 2022.

Newly-posted Chief Inspector Ambrose Swift cannot believe the devastation he finds in the Blitz-ravaged city. But for Swift and his two deputies - part-time bare-knuckle boxer Jim 'Little' Weighton and Dales farmer's daughter Kathleen Carver - it's murder, not the war, that's at the forefront of their minds.

When a series of sadistic killings is wrongly blamed on locally-stationed black American GIs, Swift, a one-armed former WW1 cavalryman who tours the rubble-strewn city on a white horse, soon discovers these are no ordinary murders. The fetid stench of racism, corruption and perversion go to the very top. And for Swift, Weighton and Carver, finding the real killers means putting their own lives at risk - because powerful forces in the US and Britain cannot let the war effort be undermined. Not even by the truth.

The novel is the first since the end of David's six-book Oberleutnant Karin Müller series, published by Zaffre in the UK and by publishers in ten other international territories. 

David's critically-acclaimed debut STASI CHILD was an official Top Twenty paperback bestseller in The Bookseller, won the CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger for best historical crime novel of 2016, and was longlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year.



DAVID YOUNG was born near Hull and, after dropping out of a Bristol University science degree, studied Humanities at Bristol Polytechnic. Temporary jobs cleaning ferry toilets and driving a butcher’s van were followed by a career in journalism on provincial newspapers, a London news agency, and international radio and TV newsrooms. He now divides his time between Twickenham and a writing base on Syros in Greece, and in his spare time supports Hull City AFC.