Review: Scared to Live by Stephen Booth

MM, $10.99, 0007172109

Scared to Live is the seventh installment in Stephen Booth's Derbyshire mystery series, which features Detectives Ben Cooper and his superior Diane Fry. The setting is integral to the plot, and Ben Cooper, a native of Edendale, has an encyclopedic knowledge of the area. His superior, DS Fry, often seems resentful of this familiarity as she had recently transferred here and never seems to quite fit in. The dynamic between these two characters is engaging, although they seem to be following two separate cases in Scared to Live. The first case which the team is called to is a house fire in which a mother and two children are killed. The father and one child were not in the house at the time, and this is suspicious to DS Fry. She pursues the two survivors while Ben Cooper is involved in the assassination of an elderly woman in a nearby village. No-one can understand why she would be the target of such violence. These two seemingly unrelated cases come together to form an unexpected revelation which explains why some people could be "scared to live." I recommend Stephen Booth to anyone who likes Peter Robinson, John Harvey or Ian Rankin.