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 βthe elite British crime
writersβ 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 Englandβs Peak Districtβone inexplicableβ¦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 heβd
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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