Black Dog [Paperback]

Stephen Booth's first novel Black Dog is an impressive portrait of two sorts of policing. Ben is a local man who knows everybody and perhap scares too much, while Diane is a stranger wherever she goes and is perhaps too cold-blooded; when they find themselves rivals for promotion, and colleagues on a difficult case, breaking strain is going to be reached sooner or later. Spoiled, young Laura Vernon is missing, soon to be found dead, and the question soon arises: is she only, or even, the first? Retired quarryman Harry found the body and perhaps knows more than he is letting on, but he will do anything rather than tell the police more than he has to. The Vernons' gardener is missing, a thuggish young man rather too fond of showing off his muscles--what does he know? What went on at the Vernons' smart cocktail parties and what do Harry and his friends talk about over their beer in the pub? This is an ingenious dark little mystery in which there may be solutions to problems, but no cures; Ben and Diane are two of the more interestingly flawed young cops of recent crime fiction. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

‘Stephen Booth’s ‘Black Dog’sinks its teeth into you and doesn’t let you go. A dark star may be born!’
Reginald Hill

‘In this atmospheric debut, Stephen Booth makes high summer in Derbyshire as dark and terrifying as midwinter’
Val McDermid

‘An exceedingly good first novel: wholly engrossing, it has well-drawn characters and a real sense of place’
Evening Standard

Dark, intense and utterly compelling, ‘Black Dog’ was an extraordinary first novel from a writer who has rapidly become the most promising crime author to emerge in the genre in years.

‘Where Cooper stood was remote and isolated… but the smell that lingered under the trees was of blood'

The long hot Peak District summer came to an end when they found Laura Vernon's body. But for local policeman Ben Cooper the work has just begun. His community is hiding a young girl's killer and a past as dark as the Derbyshire night. It seems Laura was the keeper of secrets beyond her years and, in a case where no-one is innocent, everyone is a suspect.

But Cooper's local knowledge and instincts are about to face an even greater challenge. The ambitious DC Diane Fry has been called in from another division, a woman as ruthless as she is attractive…

It's a long, hot summer in the Peak District, but the blue skies are darkened by police helicopters and the sound of birdsong is drowned out by the increasing hysteria of a full-scale search operation for a missing teenage girl. Laura Vernon is smart, sexy and the keeper of many secrets, but now she's lying dead in a thicket in the heart of the country.

Harry Dickinson finds the body, but what instincts make him so bent on obstructing the police investigation into Laura's murder? And what do he and his two fellow retired lead miners find to talk about on those long, balmy nights in the pub, hunched over their game of dominoes?

Graham Vernon is a man who knows all about secrets, and the police are at a loss to understand the attitude of this powerful businessman and his glamorous wife to their precious daughter. The Vernons are holding something back. But what could be more important than the discovery of Laura's brutal murderer?

Ben Cooper, a young DC living with tragedy, has known the villagers all his life, but his instinctive feelings about the case are called into question by the arrival of Diane Fry, a ruthlessly ambitious DC from another division. As Ben and Diane take the first steps in a complicated dance of suspicion, attraction and frustration, they discover that to understand the present, they must also understand the past – and in a world where no one is entirely innocent, pain and suffering can be the only outcome.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Stephen Booth was born in the Lancashire mill town of Burnley and has remained rooted to the Pennines during his career as a newspaper journalist. He lives with his wife Lesley in a former Georgian Dower house in Nottinghamshire and his interests include folklore, the Internet and walking in the hills of the Peak District. ‘Black Dog’ is his first novel.