A puzzle from beginning to end and a great read. Apart from the police, all the characters involved are living in fear and you sit on tenterhooks with them. Set in the Peak District and starring Detectives Fry and Cooper of his previous books, it’s first rate crime stuff.
It was an ordinary house fire with tragic consequences: a wife and two children dead. But then for DC Fry and DS Cooper the ordinary always meant trouble.
Trouble like a grieving husband behaving as though his life is in danger. Trouble like a shocking assassination – of an old woman living alone in a quiet Peak District village. Her death suggests that even the most harmless people have cause to expect the unexpected.
But Fry and Cooper are certainly surprised to find a link between the two incidents, one that will take them halfway across Europe and back again in their search for the truth.
Along the way, they discover some of the reasons why people can be scared to live – and the connection at the heart of the enquiry [that] proves to be the most surprising revelation of all…
‘It’s easy to see why Stephen Booth’s novels are so popular. The awesome scenery is an ideal background for a murder or two; he has developed his two principal characters into rounded personalities and he always gives them an intriguing mystery to investigate.’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A modern master of rural noir.’ Guardian
‘Booth’s aim is to portray the darkness that lies below the surface… in this he succeeds wonderfully well.’ Mark Billingham, Daily Mail
‘Ingenious plotting and richly atmospheric.’ Reginald Hill
Author
About Stephen Booth
Born in Lancashire, Stephen Booth has been a newspaper and magazine journalist for 25 years. He has worked as a rugby reporter, a night shift sub-editor on the ‘Scottish Daily Express’ and Production Editor of the ‘Farming Guardian’ magazine, in addition to spells on local newspapers in the North of England. Stephen lives in a Georgian dower house in Nottinghamshire with his wife, three cats and three goats.
His debut crime novel ‘Black Dog’ was the first in a series set in the Peak District and featuring young Derbyshire police detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry. ‘Black Dog’ was named as one of the six best crime novels of 2000 by the ‘London Evening Standard’, and Reginald Hill said: “Stephen Booth’s ‘Black Dog’ sinks its teeth into you and doesn’t let you go.”
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