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.