Stephen Booth "Dead and Buried"

Long term readers probably suspected it all along, but there’s a rather interesting little piece here where author Stephen Booth recounts his introduction to the key characters in a series that has run out to twelve titles with a thirteenth out in June.

It as, it seems, a quite deliberate plan, though the two characters Ben Cooper and Diane Fry, were, in Booth’s explanation seen from a distance, with a few basic impressions and subsequently, one imagines, Booth had room to move and twist things around as their true personalities emerged through the series.

He had his setting in Derbyshire’s Peak District, wanted to avoid another Rebus or similarly old, embittered world-weary, middle-aged detective inspector, so the two characters needed to be young and junior ... on the bottom rung of the ladder in CID. Given the location he wanted them to have differing points of view, and, by extension, different ambitions, though he figured a little role reversal was in order. Given the need for one to be local, the other an outsider, one sensitive and the other hard-nosed, one ambitious and the other less aspirational a bit of gender role reversal had Cooper as the sensitive, happy to stay where he was brought up local and Fry as the hard-nosed ambitious outsider.

It’s a combination that worked well enough to have the Booth titles move from grab the next one when it hits the shelves in the local library to chase down the next title once you’re aware that it’s out there.

After eleven titles there’s a fair bit of development from that original glimpse, and by Dead and Buried Diane Fry’s on the way up the promotion ladder having worked her way up to Detective Inspector in the Major Crimes Unit, with Detective Sergeant Cooper happily about to settle down in the old familiar location, in the process of setting out the arrangements for his wedding.

Crime scene officer Liz Petty seems almost totally focussed on her big day, and Cooper’s finding the whole thing a distraction as he sets about dealing with two seemingly unrelated cases as the Peak District of England goes up in flames as wildfires, probably caused by arson, spread across the moors. They’re the worst seen in the area in decades, and the fire crews are flat out.

Firemen fighting one such outbreak sight signs of a break in at an abandoned and not quite derelict pub, Cooper heads out to investigate. The Light House, located on an out of the way moorland road, closed its doors two years before and turns out to be the key to the whole thing, but Ben’s not quite inside when he’s alerted to what seems to be a much more significant discovery.

Fire fighters report finding a buried rucksack and a leather wallet out on the moorland, and since there’s a not quite cold case involving the disappearance of David and Trisha Pearson, a couple of tourists reported missing two years previously who seem to have disappeared without trace in the middle of a snowstorm. At the time they vanished there had been some controversy, with allegations of financial improprieties that may have prompted a staged disappearance.

Under the circumstances this seems much more important than investigating a reported break in.

Which, of course, is what Cooper should have done since the reader already knows there’s a body in there (thanks to the opening sequence). The possible link to the missing couple brings the Major Crimes Unit into the picture and, predictably, the body we knew was there is found by Diane Fry, providing ample excuses for her to start heaping grief on her former colleagues.  There are some major issues in Fry’s past, as the long term reader is well aware, but, really, she seems to be turning into a genuine, dyed in the wool B with a capital itch. as far as she’s concerned she’s finished with her former colleagues in the Peak District, has definitely moved on with an eye to the future and is going to resent any circumstance that might drag her back.

So while she’s sniping at the former colleagues some of them, most notably the close to retirement and therefore increasingly disinclined to worry about upsetting his superiors old-school copper, Gavin Murfin, are sniping right back.

As the investigation starts to focus on the now derelict Light House we meet former landlord Maurice Wharton, whose stock in trade involved insulting his customers, and is now facing terminal illness.  The two strands, inevitably, wind up intertwined and are brought together in an unexpected and harrowing climax that opens a number of soap opera possibilities for the next instalment, Already Dead, due to hit the market in June.

Stephen Booth "The Devil's Edge"

Having sorted out some of the Diane Fry issues in Lost River, Stephen Booth has taken the soap opera side of things several steps further in The Devil's Edge but it's always the crime side of things that provides the series with an ongoing raison d'être.

With an apparently well-off couple the victims of a bashing in the course of a home invasion the investigation gives newly promoted Ben Cooper and his squad something to get their teeth into while Diane Fry has been moved sideways into a management-training scheme where boredom and the unwelcome attention of a male colleague brings things unstuck and creates a need to give her something useful to do.

That something comes in the form of an incident involving Cooper's brother, who shoots midnight trespassers. It's a case where conflict of interest rules Cooper out of the investigation, though he's inclined to offer helpful suggestions, regardless of what the regulations might say.

The fact that Cooper's suggestions help to rule out a possible move to Derby is a nice touch as well. Brought in to supervise the Matt Cooper investigation, and with the matter resolved, DCI Mackenzie was preparing to leave when he drops the following bombshell.

You're a real farm girl, aren't you? A proper expert on rural life. I was thinking of offering you a job with my team in Derby, but you're obviously more at home here in the country.

In the rest of the soap opera scenario Ben Cooper and SOCO Liz have announced their engagement, and at the end of the story Diane Fry and the recently recruited war widow and RAF Police veteran Carol Villiers, an old school acquaintance of Cooper's, hitting it off well.

And, with Diane Fry removed from a supervisory capacity, Gavin Murfin, nearing the point where he can collect his superannuation emerges as a wryly sardonic character with an ability to do something other than munch his way through everything in sight.

But it's the latest incidents in what seems to be a series of home invasions that delivers the main plot line here, and it's a particularly strong one this time around. As far as the media are concerned, the events in the middle class rural village of Riddings are the latest burglaries  by a gang they've nicknamed The Savages but Cooper's not so sure.

For a start, unlike other cases in the same suspected series of offences, when Zoe and Jake Barron are bashed the only things that have disappeared are a mobile phone and a wallet. It's not as if their home, set on the edge of an affluent conclave that's hardly your common or garden rural village, lacks objects you'd expect to attract the would-be burglar's attention.

And as Cooper and company set about the investigation it's obvious that Riddings isn't a haven of bucolic tranquility. Nestled at the foot of an imposing ridge of solid rock, Riddings is a community of fenced-off, gated properties where security cameras are the rule rather than the exception, and the inhabitants aren't inclined to socialise outside the annual village show. There's no pub, post office or sense of community and and the villagers almost invariably have personal issues.

There's the village snooper, who discovers Zoe Barron's body and alerts the authorities, a greedy and territorial lottery winner, a disgraced headmaster on leave after an incident with a student and any number of others with a possible motive, the capacity, and in most cases the likely opportunity to do away with a neighbour though there are few obvious leads among an abundance of suspects.

Under a veneer of respectable affluence there's a seething mass of resentment and conflict as a second home is broken into with a victim apparently dead of fright and with the pressure on the investigation is increasingly based around Cooper's instincts as he solves the puzzle. You're left pretty much in the dark until the final rush at the end of the story, which is the way things should run in crime fiction, and Booth has managed this variation on the genre deftly, weaving the main plot line around the side issues and driving things forward right to the very end.

One of the best in the eleven book series, and one that has me looking forward to the sequel.

Stephen Booth "Lost River"

After nine stories in the Ben Cooper - Diane Fry series one almost gets the impression that Stephen Booth has said something along the lines of sod this for a joke, time to tie up a few loose ends as far as Diane Fry is concerned.

As far back as series opener Black Dog we've known Diane Fry has personal issues stemming from the sexual assault in Birmingham that prompted her move to Derbyshire's Peak District. After skirting around the issue in subsequent volumes and gradually unpeeling the details of Fry's personal background, particularly her dysfunctional relationship with sister Angie it's hard to see what further mileage Booth is going to get out of the assault as anything other than a disturbing element in Fry's turbulent past.

The prospect of new DNA evidence that could well be the basis for a successful prosecution has Fry heading off to Birmingham on indefinite leave of absence to co-operate with the investigation while her absence provides the excuse for Ben Cooper to get the promotion to Detective Sergeant that was stymied by Fry's arrival on the rural Derbyshire scene.

By the end of the story, however, with Booth having taken the prime suspects for the assault out of the on-going picture, revealing more about Fry's personal background than he managed to give away in nine previous volumes you get the impression that the series is about to veer off in an entirely different direction as Fry seems to be intent on closure that'll involve a posting away from Cooper territory in Derbyshire.

That move doesn't entirely preclude some on-going Cooper-Fry interaction, however, since the failure of the rape prosecution to develop along the lines Fry would have preferred has her departing from her previously straight up and down by the book persona and displaying an unexpected willingness to throw away the rule book and cut corners in direct contravention of the procedures outlined in the standard operating manual.

Cooper, on the other hand, has issues of his own, most of which centre on his involvement in the apparently accidental drowning of eight-year-old Emily Nield. As far as anyone can tell, Emily was mid-stream playing with the family dog when she slipped and fell, hitting her head on a rock. Cooper was in the vicinity, races to the scene of the accident but arrives too late to save Emily's life.

That sort of scenario is going to throw in some personal issues along the I wish I'd been able to do more lines that has Cooper getting closely enough involved with the grieving family to realise that there's something seriously amiss in the background, particularly where teenage computer gamer Alex Nield is concerned.

The reader's reaction to this story in particular is going to depend on where you're coming from as far as the series is concerned, and the departure from the Peak District countryside (the Fry-centric action is, predictably, almost entirely set in Birmingham) way well be getting away from what kept the reader going through the series to date.

Then there are the coincidences that seem to be piling up to an extent that you wouldn't expect in real life as Fry's foster brother and the man who appears to have been her biological father turn up contaminating the DNA evidence that was supposed to be bringing the rape case towards a court appearance.

There are also hints, as Fry goes around her investigations about what went wrong with the prosecution, of some previously unsuspected bigger picture that may well be the new engine that'll take the series forward now that we know, more or less, what happened in the sexual assault and have a fair idea of who was responsible.

Sighting number eleven, The Devil's Edge in the Cannonvale Big W was what prompted the search that turned up Lost River in the local library, and with the series pretty evenly split between what's sitting on my own bookshelves and what's been tracked down using the library card. More will be revealed when I tackle that one, and developments from here will be interesting since Booth has effectively killed off one major plot driver here.

Stephen Booth "The Kill Call" (Relocated)

If there's an official checklist of things to do when you're embarking on a crime fiction series the first two items on the list probably involve finding an appropriate setting and a couple of characters whose interactions can give the author a constant subplot to work the investigations around.

As far as settings go, Stephen Booth has struck gold in Derbyshire's Peaks District, a jumble of villages and moorland with enough lanes, walking tracks, disused mine shafts and other under and above ground features to allow a plethora of ways in and out of crime scenes,means to dispose of bodies and so on.

On top of that, in a rural area close to major cities a constant stream of day-trippers and other passers-by provides plenty of potential suspects, victims and red herrings, and a mixture of well-heeled landed folk, wealthy refugees from the urban sprawl and secretive, cloistered villagers who more than likely have something to hide means that you’ve got plenty of potential on the ground regardless of blow-ins from outside.

Booth hasn't done too badly with his core characters either. Start with edgy city girl with nasty things in her past Diane Fry, who’s landed the Sergeant’s position local boy son of much-loved copper Ben Cooper was aspiring to, and throw in if it moves I can probably eat it bloke Gavin Murfin who mightn't add much to the investigative action but serves as a constant source of irritation for Fry as he does a lot of the foot-slogging associated with an investigation and you’ve got plenty to work with.

By the ninth story in a series you'd expect those elements to be more or less down pat, and might suspect the author's going to have difficulty adding new elements to the mix, but Booth manages it well, intertwining contemporary issues about fox hunting (plenty of room for conflict and potential suspects and motives there) and recent historical factors most of the population have conveniently forgotten about.

The discovery of the body of a man whose head has been crushed in one spot along with an anonymous call reporting the same body half a mile away is enough to get things off to a racing start, particularly when you've got a nearby gathering of the local hunt and horseshoe tracks all around the corpse.

As is the way of these things there are a couple of issues that muddy the waters. For a start there's an enigmatic diary that must have something to do with things, but it's not clear what that something is (at least, not at first) and a youthful loner who makes off with the dead man's wallet and mobile phone, but has nothing to do with the presumed murder.

The most obvious motive lies in the confrontational and occasionally violent world of hunting and hunt protesting saboteurs, and investigations reveal that the dead man is involved in shady dealings that probably involve horse theft and the meat trade. It would help greatly of Fry and Cooper were able to track down the dead man's accountant, but he seems to have gone to ground, and in the end, that's the way it turns out to be.

So, as the investigation meanders down a complex trail we have the odd entanglement creeping in there as well. Cooper's cat dies and needs to be replaced, and he's growing increasingly distant from the surviving members of his family. Diane Fry continues to have trouble with her past, which refuses to quietly recede into the background, and we get an introduction to the 'plague village' of Eyam (pronounced 'Eem', just to provide another means to underline the Diane Fry doesn't fit in with the local yokels theme) which is a contemporary tourist attraction. 

Then there's the secondary theme that shows the oft-remembered sixties through a different perspective, a time as much about the threat of nuclear warfare and four-minute warnings as it was about Swinging London, Carnaby Street, peace, love and understanding.

As a series, this doesn't quite rate up there with my favourites, but it's good enough to warrant a check through the 'B' shelves at the local library and is something to watch for when scouring the el cheapo display at the local newsagent. 

Not, in other words, the greatest thing since sliced bread, but a definite cut above a lot that's out there.