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Product Description
From Publishers Weekly
Two gruesome homicides preoccupy Det. Sgt. Diane Fry and Det. Constable Ben Cooper in Booth's ambitious seventh police procedural (after The Dead Place). In England's Peak district, Fry looks into a suspicious house fire that killed Lindsay Mullen and two of her young children, while her husband, Brian, escaped with minor injuries. Meanwhile, Cooper investigates the death of Rose Shepherd, a reclusive woman killed by an apparent sniper-shot through her bedroom window. Both cases yield few clues, and Fry and Cooper run into one dead-end after another. While the link that they eventually uncover between the murders of Shepherd and the Mullens and a notorious Bulgarian gang stretches credulity, Booth compensates with his energetic pace and memorable characters. Genre fans may find a subplot involving psychotic hallucinations clichéd, but few will be able to predict Booth's twisted conclusion. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
Praise for 'Scared to Live': 'It's easy to see why Stephen Booth's novels are so popular. The awesome scenery is an ideal background for a murder or two; he has developed his two principal characters into rounded personalities and he always gives them an intriguing mystery to investigate.' Sunday Telegraph 'A modern master of rural noir.' Guardian 'Booth's aim is to portray the darkness that lies below the surface! in this he succeeds wonderfully well.' Mark Billingham, Daily Mail 'Ingenious plotting and richly atmospheric.' Reginald Hill Praise for Stephen Booth: 'Stephen Booth creates a fine sense of place and atmosphere ! the unguessable solution to the crime comes as a real surprise.' Sunday Telegraph 'The complex relationship between [Cooper and Fry] is excellently drawn, and is combined with an intriguing plot and a real sense of place: Stephen Booth is an author to keep an eye on.' Evening Standard 'A leading light of British crime writing.' Guardian 'In this atmospheric debut, Stephen Booth makes high summer in Derbyshire as dark and terrifying as midwinter.' Val McDermid "Black Dog' sinks its teeth into you and doesn't let go ! A dark star may be born!' Reginald Hill
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.5 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Scared to Live, July 14 2008
By Gloria Feit - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Scared to Live (Hardcover)
"Scared to Live" marks the return of DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper, the protagonists of this wonderful series by Stephen Booth. At the outset Diane is called to the scene of a fire which Diane by some instinct deems suspicious, though there is no immediate evidence to support that conclusion. A woman and two of her children have died in the blaze; the husband was not at home at the time and the daughter was at the home of her grandparents, so those family members were spared. Shortly thereafter Ben investigates the death of a middle-aged woman, apparently a recluse, shot to death by a high-powered rifle in the home where she had lived for the past ten months, with no sign of entry into the house. There are no clues as to who might have done it, much less what possible motive there could have been. The woman had been so alone and without human contact that her body had lain undiscovered for more than a day. These two incidents could not appear to be more different, one of three members of a family in a well-off rural community and the other of a middle-class `spinster' on an Edendale housing estate. But as the investigations proceed, it seems there might indeed have been connections.There is a wonderful sense of place throughout the novel, with lovely descriptive prose enabling the reader to easily visualize the Edendale area of Ben's birth, the villages of the Peak District and the old mills once so prevalent there: "The back wall of the mill overlooked the river. Its five stories were full of windows--long ranks of them separated into pairs by stone mullions. They were spaced with Victorian precision, but so small and dark that nothing was visible behind the glass. Those windows stared out across the rushing water like blank eyes. There were scores of them, a hundred pairs of eyes--a high, brick wall full of dead faces." There are also fascinating tidbits of local history and folklore.
The proverbial `fly in the ointment' is a common enough phrase, but it took this author to conjure the picture of "a tiny fly twitching its wings in the ointment." I thoroughly enjoyed this book as much for its excellent plotting as for the author's continuing development of the protagonists, individually as well as playing off each other, the latter made that much more interesting for the fact that Diane is Ben's boss. The point is often made here that "emotions always interfere with rational behaviour," exemplified in more than one of the characters. The book is recommended.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing, May 1 2007
By Thomas Downs - Published on Amazon.com
I have read all of Stephen Booth's previous Peak District novels and I enjoy the atmosphere he creates and the the way his main characters interact. But he seems to me to be always guilty of putting in rather more detail than necessary on surroundings and people's thoughts. This novel is no exception and would have benefitted from the culling of thirty or forty pages worth of unnecessary detail. This would have made the narrative tighter and more gripping. An example is a frantic chase towards the end of the story where the tension is suddenly suspended by nearly two pages of description of a room the chaser is running through.The story itself is intriguing enough, but in the end the motives for the crimes committed are not particularly compelling. And a major twist at the very end is both silly and unnecessary.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
fine English police procedural, May 24 2008
By Harriet Klausner - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Scared to Live (Hardcover)
In the Peak District, Devonshire Detective Sergeant Diane Fry leads the investigation into a deadly fire. She knows that the majority of these infernos are caused by faulty wiring, but whenever a death like this occurs, CID checks into it. In this case, Lindsay Mullen died in her room apparently confused as to how to escape, and two of her young children Liam and Jack died in their beds while the family patriarch Brian got out with minor burns and smoke inhalation as he was trying to get into the house having not been there when the fire began; he is in Edendale General. A third child, an eighteen months old daughter is missing.At the same time that Fry wishes Detective Constable Ben Cooper had the case as he understands children better than anyone at the precinct, he investigates the apparent sniper death of cloistered Rose Shepherd in her home during the early hours of the morning. Postman Bernie Wilding had stopped to deliver a package, but she failed to answer. His case is going nowhere as no one saw or heard anything. Unbeknownst to Cooper, a witness fails to come forward as Darren Turnbull was sneaking out of the neighbor's house and saw a big black car, probably Japanese stop and take off. Fry's inquiries also seem to go nowhere, but soon her investigation and that of Cooper connect.
Although the link between the Mullen fiery deaths and the Shepherd assassination is a stretch wider than the Atlantic, English police procedural fans will enjoy this fast-paced thriller that rotates investigations until they tie together leading to a fabulous final twist. The cast is strong especially the lead cops and their immediate police support teams. However, it is the cases that grip the audience as suspense mounts while the DS and the DC struggle with difficult investigations in their latest Peak District tale (see THE DEAD PLACE and ONE LAST BREATH).
Harriet Klausner
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