The Peak District author goes international with his latest
e-release; police detectives Cooper and Fry take on two
different cases which turn out to be linked. SCARED TO
LIVE presents two different, equally brutal death scenes.
In one, a young mother of two boys is killed in a house
fire, with her children. A sniffer dog confirms traces of a
petroleum product used to start the fire. The mother's
grieving husband happened to be out, perhaps conveniently?
Was it a coincidence that their youngest, a girl, was
staying with her grandparents? How tragic it is that
police always have to suspect the nearest and dearest.
In the second murder scene a reclusive woman who had bought
a country cottage some months ago and fitted electric
gates, locked windows and doors, is shot through her
bedroom window. If she was hiding from someone, it looks as
though they caught up with her. Now the police have to
trace the killer of someone who had no contact with anyone.
A Bulgarian officer comes to assist when the cases are
linked to organised crime in that country. Bulgaria, freed
from Soviet rule, became thoroughly corrupt and
impoverished, so as the officer explains, politicians are
trying to clean up the country in order to join the
European Union and get handouts. Unlike Greece, which
proved to be corrupt in a conniving way, Bulgarian
criminals are vicious and exploitative. Europol is looking
for applicants, and Diane Fry gets interested in applying
for the service.
Ben Cooper, the local man, again puts his knowledge to good
use, but SCARED TO LIVE concentrates less on landscape than
did
the previous books. We see a festival on a river and a
restored heritage cloth mill, a cablecar ride up a
mountainside and a touristy funfair park. We can't help
getting the impression that the dour sheep farmers featured
at the start of this series are becoming scarce and the
mountains of England no longer provide a living for such
people. The police adapt and modernise, while crime is no
longer local.
Stephen Booth knows his setting and shows us his people,
from a scared shy woman afraid to venture out, to a country
man on medication to stop the voices in his head. SCARED
TO LIVE is far-reaching and intelligent, a foretaste of
crime to come in Britain.
With One Last Breath and The Dead Place, Stephen Booth has
taken his place both among “the elite British crime
writers” and as a master of psychological suspense. Now
Detective Constable Ben Cooper and Detective Sergeant
Diane Fry must uncover the secrets of two grim murder
scenes in England’s Peak District—one inexplicable…and the
other unspeakable.
How do you investigate the murder of a woman without a
life? That is the challenge facing Cooper and Fry when a
reclusive agoraphobic is found shot to death in her home
by someone who took an exceptional amount of care in
executing her murder. With no friends, no family, and
virtually no contact with the outside world, the dead
woman may have simply been an unlucky victim of a random
homicide. Or was she hiding from a past that had finally
come out of hiding to kill her?
At virtually the same time, a raging house fire claims the
life of a young mother and two of her children. But as the
debris is cleared, troubling questions remain in the
ashes. Among them, how did the fire start, where was the
husband at two a.m. the day of the blaze, and was it
really the fire that killed his family?
Now, as Cooper faces the reemergence of a dark secret he’d
hoped to forget, and Fry copes with problems both personal
and professional, a horrific possibility begins to take
shape: what if the two investigations are somehow
connected? A killer is stalking the Peak District whose
motives are a mystery and whose methods are unpredictable.
And his next victims could very well be the only two cops
who can stop him.
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