Blood on the Tongue (Paperback)

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' Susanna Yager, 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' T J Binyon, Evening Standard

Coming as the latest instalment in Stephen Booth's highly acclaimed and award-winning series of thrillers, this third tale based on the exploits of detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry has a lot to live up to. Already been lauded as the best in the series, it confirms Booth's ability to keep the reader hooked right up to the very last word. Like its predecessors it is set among the unforgiving Peak District, buried here under a claustrophobic blanket of several feet of snow. The bleak majesty of the landscape is brilliantly captured and lends a tension to the storyline and the unfolding relationships that seethe relentlessly just beneath the surface. Opening with a painfully slow and lonely death of a suicide victim whose 'tears had frozen her eyelids shut', the story then turns to the snow-choked streets of the far from aptly named town of Edendale. Cooper and Fry's inter-colleague rivalry is superbly realistic, and you can't help feel for the young detective when she ends up partnered with the slobbish Gavin Murfin, a man whose dietary exploits verge on the obscene. Around the central roles, a complex cast of three-dimensional characters with believable lives easily hold the reader's interest as they draw together the present day and the recent past. Murders, suicides and unsolved mysteries are gradually and convincingly woven together in and around the Derbyshire town as modern life's myriad issues are revealed to be more closely connected to Second World War England than would at first seem likely. In paying as much attention to the small details as he does to the main twists of the plot, Booth comes up with some real treats in this excellent thriller. (Kirkus UK)

Winter in frosty Edendale, Derbyshire, is always bleak enough for law enforcement, but these days the local CID, budget-struck to the bone, is undermanned and overwhelmed by a dismaying diversity of murder most foul. There's the Snowman, a well-dressed corpse devoid of ID brought to light by highway snowplows. There's the pregnant young woman beaten and left to die on ice-capped Irontongue Hill. But most worrisome of all to Detective Constable Ben Cooper is a case almost nobody is willing to think of as murder. During WWII, a British bomber smacked into the side of Irontongue, killing its crew instantly, except for the pilot, Daniel McTeague, and the co-pilot, Zygmunt Lukasz, a Polish volunteer. Having survived the crash, Lukasz subsequently made his home in Edendale. When McTeague walked away from the downed plane, however, he vanished. How and why? Is it possible something was being covered up? Now McTeague's granddaughter has come to Edendale, determined to find answers to the murky 57-year-old mystery. Ben becomes convinced the case is linked to everything else bedeviling the CID. His boss, Detective Sergeant Diane Fry, has ambivalent feelings about the direction of Ben's sleuthing. Then again, she's equally ambivalent about Ben, who's begun to stir her in ways that, as the series continues, could grow unsettling for both of them. Longer than it should be, but the best to date of this ambitious series (Dancing with the Virgins, 2001, etc.). The plotting is solid, the local color vivid, and the thorny romance fun to follow. (Kirkus Reviews)

As if three bodies on her hands isn't enough, snow and ice have left half of 'E' division out of action and Diane Fry is forced to partner DC Gavin Murfin. She and Ben Cooper were never a match made in heaven, but next to Murfin, working with Ben starts to look like a dream.