His community is hiding a girl's killer, and a past as dark as the Derbyshire night. It seems Laura was the keeper of secrets beyond her years and, in a case where no-one is innocent, everyone is a suspect. But Cooper's local knowledge and instincts are about to face an even greater challenge. The ambitious DC Diane Fry has been transferred from a nearby city, a woman as ruthless as she is attractive Booth does a wonderful job.
It was a book I found impossible to put down. One of our best story tellers. Black Dog. Their investigations lead Fry and Cooper into the world of those whose lives revolve around death.
Read the first chapter. A dark night, an open bedroom window — and three bullets that strike from the darkness. The victim of the shocking assassination is a harmless middle-aged woman, living a reclusive life in a quiet Peak District village. But is she quite so harmless as she seems? Detective Sergeant Diane Fry knows that innocence is no defence against death. Like Rose Shepherd, the Mullens never saw the danger on the night they died.
For DS Fry and her colleague DC Ben Cooper, these are just the first pieces in a complex pattern of destruction, the latest deaths in a long trail of killings. To find the answers they need, Cooper and Fry must take their enquiries far beyond Derbyshire, to the other side of Europe and back. Cooper and Fry are about to step into dangerous and unfamiliar territory, where the criminals they seek could be far away, and yet their influence very close to hand.
Death can be everywhere, even lurking among the crowds in the tourist village of Matlock Bath. Soon they might discover some of the reasons people can be scared to live…. For decades, Pity Wood Farm has been a source of employment for poor workers passing through Rakedale, migrants with lives as abject as the labour they sought.
But now it seems a worse fate may have befallen some of those who came upon this isolated community. Routine building work at the farm has unearthed a grisly discovery: a human hand preserved in clay. When police dig up the farmyard, they find not one, but two bodies - and several years between their burials. With pressure from a new superintendent and scant forensic evidence to aid them, DS Fry and DC Cooper have only the memories of local people to piece together the tragic history of the farm.
In a case as cold as the ground, Cooper finds himself drawn to a desperate theory: that somewhere, there lies a third body which holds the key to these dreadful crimes. On a rain-swept Derbyshire moor, hounds from the local foxhunt find the body of a well-dressed man whose head has been crushed. Yet an anonymous caller reports the same body lying half a mile away. Called in to investigate the discovery, detectives DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper become entangled in the violent world of hunting and hunt saboteurs, horse theft and a little-known sector of the meat trade.
As Fry follows a complex trail of her own to unravel the shady business interests of the murder victim, Cooper realizes that the answer to the case might lie deep in the past.
History is everywhere around him in the Peak District landscape -- particularly in the 'plague village' of Eyam, where an outbreak of Black Death has been turned into a modern-day tourist attraction. But, even as the final solution is revealed, both Fry and Cooper find themselves having to face up to the disturbing reality of the much more recent past.
A May Bank Holiday in the Peak District is ruined by the tragic drowning of an eight-year-old girl in picturesque Dovedale. For Detective Constable Ben Cooper, a helpless witness to the tragedy, the incident is not only traumatic, but leads him to become involved in the tangled lives of the Nields, the dead girl's family. As he gets to know them, Cooper begins to suspect that one of them is harbouring a secret — one that the whole family might be willing to cover up.
Meanwhile, Detective Sergeant Diane Fry has a journey to make — a journey back to her roots. As she finds herself drawn into an investigation of her own among the inner city streets of Birmingham, Fry realises there is only one person she can rely on to provide the help she needs.
But that man is Ben Cooper, and he's back in Derbyshire, where his suspicions are leading him towards a shocking discovery on the banks of another Peak District river. In his most gripping case yet, newly promoted Detective Sergeant Ben Cooper investigates a series of lethal home invasions in the Peak District. In the latest attack, a woman has died in an affluent village nestling close under the long gritstone escarpment known as the Devil's Edge. Despite seething enmities between neighbours in the village of Riddings, the major lines of enquiry seem to lead to the nearby city of Sheffield.
But before Cooper and his team can crack the case, the panic spreading throughout the area results in an incident that devastates the Cooper family. And the only person available to step into the breach is Ben's old rival, Detective Sergeant Diane Fry Brutal acts of firestarting have ravaged the Peak District, and now a new wave of moorland infernos sweeps across the national park.
For DS Ben Cooper, the blazes are best left to the firefighters, even with the arsonists still at large. But when an intruder breaks into an abandoned pub, Cooper is on the case - and he swiftly unearths a pair of grim surprises. The first is evidence of a years-old double homicide. And the second is a corpse, newly dead What links the three deaths?
Where are the missing bodies? Who is responsible - and how do the raging fires fit in? The intersection of the "Black Dog" of local mythology and an actual black dog or two is also well done. However, there were several things that consistently interrupted my ability to enjoy this book. For one thing, the author infodumps with a heavy hand.
Not only are passages too full of un How frustrating! Not only are passages too full of unnecessary details that fail either to move the story forward or bring the setting alive, but on many pages every sentence is stuffed with extra information that doesn't need to be there.
I felt as though I were being force-fed, or as though I were reading the author's background notes that should not have been left in the final draft of the story. I normally love reading mysteries in part as travelogue, as they let me visit parts of the world in their pages and get to see them as the inhabitants see them rather than as a tourist. However, despite the wealth of information I now know about the Pennines area of northern England, I didn't develop any sense of understanding of the place.
This is Booth's first published novel, so perhaps he's gotten better since then. More of a problem is the rendering of the main female detective. She is a bizarre individual subject to inexplicable mood swings within the space of a few paragraphs and episodes of even stranger behavior.
She's also a stroppy bitch, and not in a good way. I'm under the impression that the author was striving to write a complex, three-dimensional, strong woman but, because in real life he viewed women as weird aliens, failed miserably. Perhaps this has gotten better with subsequent novels, but I will not be reading more books by this author to find out.
A pleasantly twisted police procedural set in the Peak District of England. If you have any inkling you might read this book, I suggest you to read none of the reviews or summaries readily available—including this one—because they will diminish your reading pleasure. Booth writes with the classic nineteenth-century omniscient narrator style, which take the reader deep into the thoughts and feelings of each character.
He does it well. More important, we find ourselves overhearing the thoughts of several characters about each other. I don't normally read police procedurals, but I enjoyed the storytelling of this one. View all 3 comments. Jul 12, KA rated it it was ok Shelves: fiction. Booth's got some good story-telling skills. This debut, however, suffers from two problems: a tendency to overt foreshadowing, which strikes the reader like a neon sign in a forest, and a seriously disappointing main female character.
It's the second that troubles me more. Diane Fry is your typical driven, damaged, almost inhumanly-focused female detective a trope I've been encountering far too often in mystery novels lately, though only in those written by men.
Depicting your women as insecure Booth's got some good story-telling skills. Depicting your women as insecure, overcompensating ball-breakers is one way of seeming enlightened--look, you've written a "strong female lead! The book was saved from a one-star rating by some complicating of both Fry and her male counterpart, Ben Cooper, before the end--a development that gives me cautious hope for the rest of the series.
Jan 06, Mary rated it really liked it. I'd been looking out for new authors I might enjoy and this book came from the Goodreads recommendations. It is the debut novel, circa , and I was delighted to see there are 11 books in all in this series. I really liked it, it did "just what it said on the tin", so to speak. Sometimes, the blurb on the back cover can be a little misleading, but not in this case. It had a great plot, characters and it was totally grounded and realistic.
Set in the Peak District, D. Diane Fry arrives to tak I'd been looking out for new authors I might enjoy and this book came from the Goodreads recommendations. Diane Fry arrives to take up a new position.
We know fairly right off, that she has suffered a trauma in her previous job, but we don't find out what until near the end of the story. She is thrown into a murder enquiry almost on arrival and partnered with D. Ben Cooper, a local cop who is popular and endearing, but also has his own problems.
The murder centers around the discovery of the body of a 15 year old girl, found by an old man and his dog whilst out for a walk. It's a fascinating police procedural story, which keeps the reader intrigued right to the end. I love a story where you can't really figure out the whys and whats until the end.
You get a good line up of suspects and motives, but nothing is as it seems. There is also the developing relationship between Fry and Cooper and she comes across as a really hard, unfeeling and ambitious type, who will step all over Ben to get to the top, but there is a flip side to all interesting characters and Diane Fry has one it seems. I just had one little niggle on the editing, I hate when a mistake slips in, Ben is interviewing an elderly lady and the description of her cardigan colour is blue on one page and two pages later, it has turned green, unless Ben is colour blind, unlikely.
I know, I am picky, otherwise, it was just great. I have to now check to see if my local library have the next few books in order. Fingers crossed. The British police procedural, crime thriller is a very well-populated genre I am dis Black Dog is the first book in a series of British police procedural, crime thrillers written by Stephen Booth starring Ben Cooper and Diane Fry, set in the Peak District of Northern England near Manchester.
The British police procedural, crime thriller is a very well-populated genre I am discovering. So my tastes have become more discerning as I read more of them. Generally, I prefer books that feature at least one female protagonist or are written by a female author. I was pleasantly surprised by how engaging Black Dog is. The mystery is built around the disappearance and inevitable demise of a year-old girl who is the daughter of the nouveau riche couple who own the biggest house in the Edendale area.
They are polar opposites; Cooper is instinctive, well-liked by his colleagues and generally attuned to the sensibilities and sensitivities of the locals. Fry, on the other hand, is an outsider, perceived as a nervy, ambitious woman seeking to rise in the ranks by taking advantage of any situation to get noticed and advance her career.
Somehow the two are paired together and sparks fly. There is definitely NOT sexual tension between the two, but there is professional rivalry and perhaps personal antipathy , especially when Cooper realizes that Fry is much more likely to get the next Detective Sergeant promotion after his family problems start to negatively impact his job performance.
The details of the mystery in Black Dog are quite interesting , with a surplus of suspects and a large number of red herrings thrown at the reader.
The book is quite suspenseful and does a good job of slowly revealing different aspects of the personality traits of both Cooper and Fry which make me very interested to see how their interactions develop in future books.
The setting of the books is also somewhat unusual, a rural, sparsely populated, mountainous area called the Peak Pike District that is an actual tourist attraction. The supporting characters are not particularly diverse, but when there are two main characters who are both nuanced and well-drawn, that can sustain and fuel my interest in reading more books in the series, which I definitely intend to do. Apr 19, Kathleen rated it it was ok Recommends it for: folks who enjoy the brit mysteries. Recommended to Kathleen by: fantastic fiction, Susan Hill site.
Shelves: , police , mystery , british. Got this thru ILL since no library in the area possessed a copy. And now I know why Perhaps I'll read more of Mr. Booth, Got this thru ILL since no library in the area possessed a copy. Booth, but I'll whittle down my to-read heap a bit first. Only liked the descriptions of the Peak District topography View 1 comment. Oct 15, Priya rated it it was amazing.
This is a fantastic read. It is a unique story, with all the pieces of the intricately crafted puzzle falling smoothly in place at the end. You know, in most popular mysteries the few that I have read, anyway the whole plot has an increasing frenzy and is the build up to a fabulous, thrilling ending. If that is the kind of conclusion you like to your reads, this might seem disappointing, a let down.
Because the ending is too simple. It is so simple, that it would sound far fetched to people who are used to that grand climax. It reminded me of Stephen King's Under the Dome, for no reason other than how it made me feel; surprised and convinced, not to mention, wholly awed. It was impossible for me to have guessed it, but I know the answer had been right there all along, staring me in the face. The only disappointment I felt was for not having thought of it! But even if not the ending, there is so much to appreciate and be impressed by in this book.
While still being a swift mystery, Black Dog is like a laid back character sketch of all sorts of people in your usual small town. I loved the quirky ones, of course, like Harry Dickinson. And I also liked Gwen, his wife, about whom Cooper was so right - some people just get miserably tangled in messes they don't deserve to be in. Most of all, I liked Diane Fry; because she was so realistic. I liked how, as an outsider, she provided a neatly contrasting perspective on the rest of the team; one which I couldn't easily dismiss as she was also one of the good guys.
The drama in Cooper's life was overwhelming and effectively justified the few character flaws in my mind which made him much better than a conventional Lee Child-ish detective! The book is wonderfully written, with hilarious comments at the most unexpected times and apt vivid descriptions that bring the setting to life. Mostly, I found Black Dog by Stephen Booth to be a perfect start to a series; which is something I hardly ever get to say.
And Diane Fry and Ben Cooper do seem to make, possibly in spite of themselves, a pretty good team. A writer new to me and starting from the beginning of the Cooper and Fry series. This looks like a straight -forward police procedural novel, as DC Cooper, the local lad, and son of a police hero, becomes involved in the murder of a 15year old girl.
Three old men are part of the story who have a close bond of friendship built up through work in the local lead mines of the Peak District and service in the army during world war two. The descriptions of the Peak District and the valleys and tour mak A writer new to me and starting from the beginning of the Cooper and Fry series.
The descriptions of the Peak District and the valleys and tour make you feel as if you were treading the local bye-ways and paths. The blackness creeps up at every turn leading to a sinister ending. Cooper meets Fry who is newly transferred into the area and their relationship is far from smooth, giving the book a sharp edge. A good read. Dec 04, Sandy rated it liked it Shelves: crime , detectives , police-procedural , family-drama , mystery , suspense , british-cops , series , contemporary-fiction , british-authors.
View 2 comments. Jul 12, Eadie rated it really liked it Shelves: read Book Description Fifteen-year-old Laura, daughter of the wealthy Vernon family, is missing. When retired miner Harry Dickinson reports that he's found the body lying in the woods, his strangely obstinate refusal to cooperate with the investigation raises more than a few eyebrows. Whatever Harry knows about what has happened up in those woods, he's certainly not telling.
Cooper teams up with Detective Constable Diane Fry, an ambitious rookie with a few secrets of her own. As they work to unravel t Book Description Fifteen-year-old Laura, daughter of the wealthy Vernon family, is missing.
As they work to unravel the baffling crime, the young detectives find themselves in a complicated two-step of suspicion and sexual tension. Set against the atmospheric backdrop of Northern England's Peak District, Black Dog is an evocative, gorgeously written work of psychological suspense.
My Review I found this book to be an excellent debut by Stephen Booth. I enjoyed his writing right from the start. His descriptions allow you to visualize the setting and you feel like you are right there. This is not your typical crime novel. They are competing to become a sergeant.
They seem to be doing a dance of suspicion, attraction and frustration. Can't wait to read the next book in the series to see how this relationship pans out. The plot and storyline are excellent and the reason and person behind the killing was a complete surprise to me.
I would highly recommend this book to those who like psychological suspense. I'm not sure if this is the oddest way to find a book recommendation but last week on the night before the election I was watching Jeremy Paxman being interviewed on Newsnight about his preparations for election night.
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