"The scenic Peak District produces a chilling crime"
Reviewed by Clare O'Beara
Posted February 7, 2014
Mystery Police Procedural
The rugged, isolating mountains of the Peak District are
again the setting for police detectives Ben Cooper and
Diane Fry. By now we know this author writes quality
books, well researched and dripping with cold, wet
details. So settle in for the story.
THE DEAD PLACE merges a few cases - a skeletal set of
remains is discovered in woods, but the woman has not been
reported missing locally. A weirdo phones the cop-shop from
a village call-box with a three-minute rant about killing.
A young woman, having worked late, is sure she's being
followed as she makes her way through a multi-storey car
park. Busy and snowed under with paperwork, DS Fry leaves
the more usual murder, where a council house man bashed up
his girlfriend and phoned the police himself, to meet a
funeral director and ask if anyone was seen behaving
suspiciously at a funeral; using a call-box perhaps?
Location is everything in this series. A farm at the rainy
end of the valley is permanently wet; the gritstone and
limestone mountains shut off sunlight early and moss
carpets everything. In town, the lack of flat land makes a
multi-storey car park the only option for office workers
and shoppers. Roads and tracks are sparsely used but
motorways are thronged with traffic rushing elsewhere.
The quiet, slow-paced locals know everyone, resent
outsiders. Abandoned graveyards and a plague village dot
the landscape. CCTV, geocaching and forensic facial
reconstruction however bring this tale right up to the
present.
Local man Cooper has a new concern, his mother having
fallen at her senior home - city girl Fry finds herself
growing further apart from her recently returned sister by
the day. The curmudgeon and rough diamond DC Murfin has
suddenly decided to cram for a sergeant's exam, in an
excellent example of character growth. The painstaking plod
of detective work is well depicted, as is the sombre
process of consigning the deceased to the hereafter.
My usual dislike of macabre rantings in italics, which we
get interspersed showing us the mindset of the antagonist,
is the main complaint I have about this book. Italics are
very hard on the eye. And when I've read one set of
ravings, I skip over the rest. Some readers might be more
ghoulish in their reading tastes. Then again, with a title
like THE DEAD PLACE what would one expect? Stephen Booth
has drawn from his career as a journalist - such people get
to attend a lot of local funerals - to flesh out the story
and as always this tale of police persistence doesn't
disappoint.
SUMMARY
"This killing will be a model of perfection. An
accomplishment to be proud of. And it could be tonight or
maybe next week. But it will be soon. I promise." The anonymous phone calls indicate a disturbed mind with an
unnatural passion for death. Cooper and Fry are hoping
against hope that the caller is just a harmless crank
having some sick fun. But the clues woven through his
disturbing messages point to the possibility of an all-too-
real crime…especially when a woman vanishes from an office
parking garage. But it's the mystery surrounding an unidentified female
corpse left exposed in the woods for over a year that
really has the detectives worried. Whoever she might have
been, the dead woman is linked to the mystery caller, whose
description of his twisted death rituals matches the
bizarre manner in which the body was found. And the mystery
only deepens when Cooper obtains a positive I.D. and learns
that the dead woman was never reported missing and that she
definitely wasn't murdered. As the killer draws them closer into his confidence, Ben
and Diane learn everything about his deadly obsessions
except what matters most: his identity and the identity of
his next victim… From the Hardcover edition
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