Customer Reviews

Scared To Live

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"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.

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.

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

#7 Ben Cooper/Diane Fry police procedural mystery set in the Peak District of the UK. Two major cases are plaguing the local cop shop--a house fire that killed a mother and her two children, determined later to be arson, and thus murder, and the professional-style killing of a sixty-ish reclusive woman in a small neighboring village. No one really knew Rose Shepherd, as she'd moved in just 10 months previously and 'kept herself to herself' as they say. Her history and paper trail was very brief, but Ben Cooper knows if he can find out where the enigmatic woman came from and who she was, he will find a motive for her murder.

Diane concentrates on the fire, believing that if she can solve such a grisly, heart-wrenching crime, it will be a big feather in her cap towards promotion. Ben is in the beginnings of a relationship with a crime scene technician, Liz Petty, and also has to deal with his brother Matt's worries about the inheritability of schizophrenia, which their mother suffered from badly.

I really like this series--the author does a great job of setting the scene in the beautiful Peak District, and I quite enjoy Ben Cooper's character. Diane Fry bugs the hell out of me, but she is at least consistently done. The one thing that I find sets my teeth on edge is that the dialogue at times sounds stilted and unnatural, the characters using each others' names in conversation when they are the only ones in the room and could only be talking to each other, for example. Who does that?

But aside from that one flaw, Booth's stories always read and flow easily, although I figured the ending plot twist out about 2/3 of the way through so it wasn't much of a surprise.

In "Scared to Die," the author's latest--and best--Cooper and Fry mystery, set in the touristy Peak District of England, things get noirishly complicated after a late-middle-aged apparently agoraphobic woman is found murdered in her seemingly secure home while a three members of a family are found burned to death in theirs.

Naturally, the cases turn out to be related. Naturally, as usual, DS Fry manages to antagonize quite a few people along the way while DC Cooper pursues clues with diligence and seems to be in the process of getting a life, too.

As before, it's clever, well plotted, and just when you think it's going down the road to Cliché-land, it deftly avoids doing so. You'll probably guess that one of the characters who turns up is not quite what he seems, but I doubt if you'll guess who he will turn out to be before all is revealed.

There are two sequences that Hitchcock probably would have loved to have filmed: one involves Cooper and another policeman (to reveal who he is would give away elements of the plot) chase after a suicide-bent man via cablecar and then a spiral staircase (I was getting dizzy just reading the passage). Another is a pursuit that happens during a Halloween festival--a festival that's nothing like an American celebration of the holiday.

As always, Mr. Booth demonstrates his skill at character development, both Cooper and Fry's and the secondary characters as well (the yuptastic couple that is obsessed with wiping out grey squirrels sticks in my memory, as does the Scottish fire inspector).

"Scared to Live" is the seventh in a series of crime novels by Steven Booth, following detectives Diane Fry and Ben Cooper. This is my first time reading the series and I found Sergeant Fry and Cooper to be an enjoyable team to follow. The story however falls flat with an overabundance of imagery, creating page after page of detail on something you don't even care about. The story itself is far fetched, and with each page the story becomes more absurd. I wanted to like this book, the characters were interesting and I found myself intrigued with their development. Booths desire, however, to add unnecessary words and develop dubious ideas lost me somewhere in the middle of this five hundred page summer read.