With One Last Breath and The Dead Place, Stephen Booth has taken his place both among "the elite British crime writers" and as a master of psychological suspense. Now Detective Constable Ben Cooper and Detective Sergeant Diane Fry must uncover the secrets of two grim murder scenes in England's Peak District--one inexplicable...and the other unspeakable.

How do you investigate the murder of a woman without a life? That is the challenge facing Cooper and Fry when a reclusive agoraphobic is found shot to death in her home by someone who took an exceptional amount of care in executing her murder. With no friends, no family, and virtually no contact with the outside world, the dead woman may have simply been an unlucky victim of a random homicide. Or was she hiding from a past that had finally come out of hiding to kill her?

At virtually the same time, a raging house fire claims the life of a young mother and two of her children. But as the debris is cleared, troubling questions remain in the ashes. Among them, how did the fire start, where was the husband at two a.m. the day of the blaze, and was it really the fire that killed his family?

Now, as Cooper faces the reemergence of a dark secret he'd hoped to forget, and Fry copes with problems both personal and professional, a horrific possibility begins to take shape: what if the two investigations are somehow connected? A killer is stalking the Peak District whose motives are a mystery and whose methods are unpredictable. And his next victims could very well be the only two cops who can stop him.

From the Hardcover edition.

Sunday, 23 October

Even on the night she died, Rose Shepherd couldn't sleep. By the early hours of the morning, her bed was like a battleground--hot, violent, chaotic. Beneath her, the sheet was twisted into painful knots, the pillow hard and unyielding. Lack of sleep made her head ache, and her body had grown stiff with discomfort.

But sleeplessness was familiar to Miss Shepherd. She'd started to think of it as an old friend, because it was always with her. She often spent the hours of darkness waiting for the first bird to sing, watching for the greyness of dawn, when she knew there'd be people moving about in the village. There might be the sound of a van in the street as someone headed off for an early shift at the quarry, or the rumble of a farmer's tractor in the field behind the house. She didn't feel so completely alone then, as she did in the night.

For Rose Shepherd, this was the world. A distant noise, a half-heard voice, a snatched moment of indirect contact. Her life had become so confined that she seemed to be living in a small, dark box. The tiniest crack of light was like a glimpse of God.

By two o'clock, Rose had been out of bed twice already, moving aimlessly around the room to reassure herself that she was still alive and capable of movement. The third time, she got up to fetch herself a glass of water. She stood in the middle of the bedroom while she drank it, allowing her toes to curl deep into the sheepskin rug, clutching at the comfort of its softness, an undemanding gentleness that almost made her weep.

As always, her mind had been running over the events of the day. There was no way she could stop it. It was as if she had a video player in her head, but it was stuck in a loop, showing the same scenes over and over again. If they weren't from the day just past, then they were snapshots from previous days--some of them years before, in a different part of her life. The scenes played themselves out, and paused to allow her to fret whether she could have done things differently. Then they began over again, taunting her with the fact that past events were unalterable. What was done, was done.

It was one of the reasons she couldn't sleep, of course. Her brain was too active, her memories too vivid. Nothing seemed to slow down the thoughts that stalked backwards and forwards in her consciousness, like feral animals roaming the edge of the forest, restless and apprehensive.

But Rose was glad that she'd been out the previous day. She'd been doubtful about it beforehand. No journey was without its risks, even if it was only three miles over the hill and down into the village of Matlock Bath. Despite a diversion to the shopping village, she'd arrived in the village too early, and had time to kill once she'd parked the Volvo.

Standing in her bedroom, Rose smiled at the recollection of her own weakness. Matlock Bath had been busy, as she ought to have known it would be. At first, she'd been disturbed by the number of people on North Parade, and nervous of the motorcyclists in their leathers, clustered by their bikes eating fish and chips out of paper wrappings. When she passed too close to them, the smell had been so overpowering that she thought she would faint. And that would never do.

She turned slowly on the rug, fighting the muzziness and disorientation of being awake when her body wanted to sleep. There were only two points of light in her bedroom--the face of her alarm clock, showing two thirty--three, and the echo of its green luminescence in the mirror on the opposite wall. She found it difficult to focus on the light, because she couldn't judge its distance from the reflection.

She...

 

"Crime fiction for the thinking man or woman: powerful...poignant...and damnably hard to put down."

 

Guardian, UK...

"A modern master of rural noir."

 

"Few will be able to predict Booth's twisted conclusion."

 

Stephen Booth is a two-time winner of the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel. He is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Black Dog and Dancing with the Virgins. Other bestsellers in his Cooper and Fry series include Blood on the Tongue, One Last Breath, and Blind to the Bones, which earned him the prestigious Dagger in the Library Award. A former journalist, Stephen Booth lives in Nottinghamshire, England.


From the Hardcover edition.

 

 

Scared to Live by Stephen Booth
Continue Browsing		View Wish List