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British mystery won't be everybody's cup of tea
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Published: November 30, 2008
Scared to Live. By Stephen Booth. Bantam. 419 pages. $25.
This British police procedural murder mystery is the seventh novel in the Diane Fry and Ben Cooper series, which, now that the eighth novel is complete, belies the impression given by the mere three titles listed on the "Also By" page in the front matter of this book. Bantam's marketing department apparently wants the reading public to know only about the Stephen Booth books that Bantam has released.
From an American perspective, the acronym-filled British-cop jargon is sometimes an obstacle to understanding what the characters are discussing and where they stand in the bureaucratic hierarchy. Lucky for us, it's not so overwhelming as to undermine the story.
Set in the Peak District of Derbyshire, the novel opens with two seemingly unrelated events: the murder of Rose Shepard, who is gunned down by a sniper as she stands near her bedroom window, and the house fire that kills Linsay Mullen and her two children -- while her husband and "adopted" child are away.
While Ben Cooper is busy gathering evidence from the Rose Booth murder, Diane Fry, in an effort to distinguish herself in the police department, determines that the house fire was set by an arsonist. In developing the remainder of the murder-mystery elements of the story, Booth does an excellent job of interweaving plot threads into a Gordian Knot of red herrings, teasers and reversals. But every intelligent discovery made by Diane and Ben is offset by equally idiotic assumptions and procedural errors they make while we as readers roll our eyes and say things like, "No, that is not what all the neighbors said, only one neighbor said that!" or "If you're really a detective, you don't ask the citizen with the only photos of the fire to e-mail them to you -- you confiscate the camera and photos as evidence!"
To allow his characters such elementary failings reeks of plot manipulation. Besides that, you can't conveniently cause detectives to act in ways contrary to the norm without readers wondering how they ever made detective. Furthermore, if we don't respect lead characters, we cannot effectively relate to them. Good crime fiction allows only the jerk cops to act with such incompetence.
The series-long attraction between Diane and Ben, which in this novel amounts to no more than watered-down innuendo and a hint of sexual tension, cools off as each sets their sights elsewhere. Ben goes as far as sleeping with another woman, but readers may fall asleep too, since the steamy parts were either deleted in editing or were never written at all. In Diane's case, she liaises with a Bulgarian detective who fits the romance genre's rough and mysterious exotic tall-dark-handsome-foreigner formula so completely as to seem lifted directly from a Harlequin paperback. Diane goes as far as smelling his cologne and almost touching his hand -- oh my! The lack of steam in these trysts leads me to wonder if Booth included romance elements for his ultra-conservative grandmother -- or maybe for his pre-pubescent daughter (assuming he has either of those).
How much you enjoy this murder mystery will be partly determined by your reasons for reading murder mysteries. If intricate plotting, exotic locales, interesting historical tidbits and last-page revelations are enough to satisfy you, then you might rate this book as high as mid-list, but you must be patient -- the novel gets truly interesting only in the final pages. If you insist that all plot threads be "finished" by the end of the book, or if your favorite reading consists of stories with emotional impact, your time may be better spent on another of Booth's books in the series -- all of which rank higher in the listings than Scared to Live.
■ Steven Beach is a writer who lives in Lawsonville.
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