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.