I was pleased to get another great Peak District mystery in the Cooper and Fry series. Local officer Ben Cooper is by now a Detective Sergeant, and he notes the rowdy change that comes over scenic Edendale on weekend nights. Nowhere is safe from the modern world, and with isolated houses, violent burglars are rampaging, fearless.

THE DEVIL'S EDGE is a landscape feature, a wall of rock which attracts climbers. Just under the Edge is a luxury home where the latest burglary has gone badly wrong. A wife lies dead, a husband seriously injured. The children luckily were upstairs and unharmed. Ben has to stifle his excitement at working on a major crime in his new post. These burglars have to be stopped. Diane Fry meanwhile is sitting on tedious management change discussion sessions, hoping for a transfer to something more important but knowing there is little chance.

The details of pretentious isolated houses, with electric gates and high hedges, and price tags that prevent anyone local from purchasing, ring sadly true. The new arrivals don't shop locally or blend with the community. They hardly even speak to their neighbours. Family dynamics, odd neighbours and foreign wealth jostle for attention. This makes Ben Cooper's job all the more difficult as he looks for witnesses and background information. Previous books have focused on generations of rural cottage dwellers or immigrants, so this is a good balance in portraying the nature of the Peak villages nowadays. Ben's brother Matt is still trying to make a living on the dairy farm, with increasingly less success, and now increased tension as farmers fear burglars.

A newcomer to the cast is a welcome female face, Carol Villiers, who has made her way to Ben's squad via the RAF where she was an MP. She counterpoints Constable Gavin Murfin's lugubrious humour perfectly. Author Stephen Booth always keeps in touch with the ordinary people and how their lives are evolving, with touches from hang-gliding to satellite images creating the town. Tensions and misdirections keep the reader rapt as the tale of THE DEVIL'S EDGE unfolds. Stephen Booth is no ordinary writer of police procedural crime - he delivers Derbyshire to us in its long past and swiftly changing present. This one's a winner.