- Hardcover: 480 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins; First edition (5 Jun 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007172079
- ISBN-13: 978-0007172078
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16 x 4.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 467,730 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Scared to Live
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Praise for 'The Dead Place': 'Another thoroughly enjoyable book from one of Britain's best crime writers.' Sunday Telegraph 'Dark Derbyshire mystery! not for the squeamish.' Daily Mail Praise for Stephen Booth: 'Stephen Booth creates a fine sense of place and atmosphere ! the unguessable solution to the crime comes as a real surprise.' Sunday Telegraph 'The complex relationship between [Cooper and Fry] is excellently drawn, and is combined with an intriguing plot and a real sense of place: Stephen Booth is an author to keep an eye on.' Evening Standard 'In this atmospheric debut, Stephen Booth makes high summer in Derbyshire as dark and terrifying as midwinter.' Val McDermid 'Black Dog sinks its teeth into you and doesn't let go ! A dark star may be born!' Reginald Hill 'A leading light of British crime writing.' Guardian 'Best traditional crime novel of the year.' Independent
Mark Billingham, Daily Mail
'Booth's aim is to portray the darkness that lies below the surface... in this he succeeds wonderfully well.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Oh dear - the lure of TV or Film?,
By
This review is from: Scared to Live (Paperback)
Booth's Peak District crime novels, featuring Sergeant Diane Fry and Constable Ben Cooper, have, until now, been a fine series, notable for both good characterisation, and an identification with the gritty realities of rural life and it's small-time crime.
In Scared to Live, however, that's all been lost in what appears to be a bid for a more TV or film friendly format. Now we have mysterious Eastern European gangsters, assassinations, staged chases through crowded firework displays and deserted car-parks, dramatic gypsy women - all in and around Matlock........... It is inevitable that any crime novel series tied to a particular town or area will run the danger of turning it's locale into one of the most dangerous places on earth, but until now, Mr.Booth appeared to avoiding that mistake. Scared to Live has a plot which manages to stretch even the strange, but accepted, conventions of it's genre. The characters have slipped into shallow ciphers, and the twist at the end would, in my opinion, be an insult to any police force.
29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Superior Crime Yarn,
By Mappi (Midlands, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Scared to Live (Hardcover)
Absolutely nothing wrong with this book and it will appeal to fans of Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson - superior crime novels with repeating characters using location.
This is the seventh in a series that has been coming out at a rate of one per year. It doesnt matter too much if you haven't read the series - as I hadn't - although I enjoyed it enough to order the 1st book and will work my way through. Set in the Peak District and using location to good effect - it tells the investigation into two incidents - the murder of a harmless, reclusive old lady and three deaths in the same family in a house fire. What seemed unusual for a crime novel is that you are just as much in the dark as the detectives for the first 300 or so pages. There is no story apart from the investigation itself.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not bad but disappointing,
By
This review is from: Scared to Live (Paperback)
To a large degree I share the previous reviewer's disappointment with this book. I have been a huge fan of Booth since his first book, having felt that in all his books, notably the superb 'Dancing With The Virgins', he not only gives us an intriguing puzzle to solve, but also invests his characters, particularly Ben and Diane, with an emotional depth quite unusual for this genre, so his readers can invest in their lives and watch as they develop and deal with their problems and hang-ups from novel to novel. But there is little of that here. Apart from a few irrelevant (unless I have missed something) and clumsily unrealistic exchanges between Ben and his brother in which the latter torments himself with the fear that his young children may develop schizophrenia (!), there is nothing here to move the characters on. Symptomatic of this is Diane's sister Angie, who has featured quite prominently in the series but here is literally mentioned once in a couple of lines, as if at a late stage someone had reminded Booth that she was supposed to be living with Diane, so he'd better at least mention her in passing. Instead we get a tale of Eastern European gangsters (so ten-a-penny in crime fiction at the moment that they are becoming a cliche), baby trafficking, a Bulgarian detective flying over to offer his assistance (and whose ultimate motivation one can see coming a mile off) and people getting blown to bits on the streets of Chesterfield. Don't get me wrong; as a straight crime novel/whodunnit this is a good one. It's just that previous books in the series have been so distinguished that we have come to expect rather more from this writer, which is why the feeling of let-down is unavoidable.
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