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THE DEAD PLACE
by Stephen Booth
HarperCollins, June 2005
464 pages
$24.95CDN
ISBN: 0007172052


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

There appears to be a serial killer at large in the Peak District in this fifth in the series featuring Ben Cooper and Diane Fry. At least someone is loose, sending bizarre and elliptical messages to the police that seem to be threatening wholesale murder.

The only problem is that there aren't any corpses, or if there are, none has yet turned up. And when one finally does materialize, it turns out to have been dead for many months, long enough to be almost wholly skeletonized. Ben Cooper is determined to find out who she was and why she was lying about in the woods instead of finding a decent burial.

He turns to a forensic artist for a reconstruction that produces fairly quick results. The body is that of a woman who died of natural causes and was supposed to have been cremated more than a year ago. Meanwhile, Diane Fry, though as filled with resentment as ever, is curiously troubled by the tapes and can hardly bring herself to be interested in the puzzle of the errant skeleton.

Attempting to unravel the significance of the mysterious messages and to determine if the skeleton is connected to them in any way requires Ben and Diane to learn rather more about the lore of death and mortuary practice than they really wanted to know. (Occasionally this reader, at least, could have dispensed with some of the details of the undertaker's art as well).

Since crime fiction inevitably deals with death, I suppose it makes sense to take on the subject literally, but some might find the very narrowed focus of this novel more than a little off-putting. Still, Booth writes really well, especially when developing rural vignettes -- the landscape, the weather, the inhabitants, in particular this time the altogether admirable Mr Jarvis and his dogs, all of them straight out of COLD COMFORT FARM. It is Booth's ability to conjure up a solid and compelling setting that keeps us reading, even through some particularly unsettling specifics about our ultimate end.

This review refers to the Canadian trade paper edition, identical to that published in the UK. A US edition is forthcoming, but no date has as yet been announced.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, July 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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