Part of Series

Ben Cooper & Diane Fry

Series · 19 books

By Stephen Booth

The weather is cold and the clues no warmer as Peak District detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry tackle a medley of mysteries—each one knottier than the last—in English author Stephen Booth's haunting third novel, Blood on the Tongue. The unidentified body of a dead man has turned up on a frosty roadside. An abused woman is found curled in the snow on nearby Irontongue Hill, an apparent suicide. And there's the lingering puzzle of a Royal Air Force bomber that crashed into Irontongue back in 1945, killing everyone on board except for the pilot, who reportedly walked away from the wreckage... and was never heard from again. With leave and sickness decimating the ranks of the Edendale police force, all hands are needed to solve the modern deaths. But constable Cooper finds himself distracted by the World War II tragedy, in large part because of a beguiling young Canadian, the granddaughter of that missing pilot, who's come to Edendale determined to clear her ancestor's name. Not surprisingly, these various cases eventually intertwine. But how they're linked by time and tragedy provides the intrigue here. Equally involving is the prickly alliance between Cooper, the "too bloody nice" local lad, and his superior, the emotionally guarded outsider, Fry. Plotted for maximum psychological suspense, teeming with singular secondary characters, and capitalizing on Britain's still-poignant memories of the last world war, Blood on the Tongue is an ambitious and remarkably mature work that delivers on the promise Booth showed in his first novel, Black Dog. —J. Kingston Pierce

Avg Rating

3.93

Number of Ratings

2,833

5 STARS

27%

4 STARS

44%

3 STARS

24%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Stephen Booth

Author · 21 books

Stephen Booth is the author of 18 novels in the Cooper & Fry series, all set around England's Peak District, and a standalone novel DROWNED LIVES, published in August 2019. The Cooper & Fry series has won awards on both sides of the Atlantic, and Detective Constable Cooper has been a finalist for the Sherlock Award for Best Detective created by a British author. The Crime Writers’ Association presented Stephen with the Dagger in the Library Award for “the author whose books have given readers most pleasure.” The novels are sold all around the world, with translations in 16 languages. The most recent title is FALL DOWN DEAD. A new Stephen Booth standalone novel with a historical theme, DROWNED LIVES, will be published in August 2019: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drowned-Live... In recent years, Stephen has become a Library Champion in support of the UK’s ‘Love Libraries’ campaign. He's represented British literature at the Helsinki Book Fair in Finland, appeared with Alexander McCall Smith at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival in Australia, filmed a documentary for 20th Century Fox on the French detective Vidocq, taken part in online chats for World Book Day, taught crime writing courses, and visited prisons to talk to prisoners about writing. He lives in Nottinghamshire.