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Stephen Booth has again drawn us into the world of the Peak District of England. This time, May Day is fast approaching, but up on the moors at Dark Peak and in the village of Withens, it is still chilly. The churchyard of St. Asaph's at Withens is overgrown and Neil Granger promises the vicar, Derek Alton, he will help him clear it the next day. Granger goes up onto the moor later that night and the next day, is found, his face blackened, his eyes torn out, beaten to death near the old disused Victorian train tunnels. Meanwhile, Diane Fry, partnered with Gavin Murfin, since Ben Cooper is on secondment to the Rural Crime Team, goes to visit the parents of Emma Renshaw who had disappeared two years earlier, while on her way home from university. Emma's parents, especially her mother, are sure she is still alive and they have built their lives around her return, but Emma's mobile phone had just been found in a field. Neil Granger had been one of her roommates. Granger had been related to the Oxley family who lived in a terrace of houses in the village of Withens. They are a strange group, very suspicious of strangers and very hard to talk to, but Ben is sent to question them. This one is Ben's book. Diane is relegated to the fringes, even during her investigation of the missing girl, which quickly merges with Ben's investigation of the murder of Neil Granger. Booth has written another great story set in the Derbyshire peaks, with the violence of nature paralleling human violence. The importance of families is also a theme of this book, whether it be the well adjusted Cooper family, with Ben, not quite 30, finally having moved off the family farm, visiting his schizophrenic mother in the home every week, and staying close to his brother and his family, or the Oxleys, who seem to be the village tearaways but whose patriarch is very much in control, or Fry, the product of a series of foster homes who has been searching for her sister for 16 years. However, I didn't find this book as satisfying as the last. Perhaps I hoped for more of Diane Fry than Ben Cooper. Maybe the next book will be Diane's story.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, April 2003
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