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Rating: 
Summary: Another solid offering from Stephen Booth...
Review: As with "Black Dog", Stephen Booth has written a chilly, uncomfortable, airtight story that requires full concentration (or else you'll find yourself going back and reading copious numbers of pages again trying to figure out where you lost the thread), but it rewards. The story is a good one, but I liked his unsparing portrayal of the characters who populate this book and his unflinching and unhappy look at the world of livestock slaughterhouses and failing farms. Quite a long way from a comfortable armchair. Oh, and there's a ripping good mystery here, too!
Rating: 
Summary: Top notch
Review: Excellent mystery set in the north of England. Good sense of place, main characters well developed. plot complex and moves at a good pace. Detective Ben Cooper, a local copper with a good feel fo the locals is not led off on tangents like the others, particularly Detective Diane Fry, who has recently arrived from the south. The murder of Jenny Weston and attack on Maggie Crew appear to be related but it is only towards the end that the link between them becomes clear but is muddied considerably by the apparent link with a dog fighting business.The resolution is slow coming but very satisfactory. The on-again-off-again relationship between Ben and Diane appears to be warming up but both have depths and secretes not yet available to the other. Reminds me somewhat of the early books by Peter Robinson. rating 4.5/5
Rating:
Summary: Great!
Review: Just finished this book. Excellent. What sensitivity for the human condition; such understanding and empathy. Excellent mystery. Better than the first and can hardly wait for the third. Can only say ...wow... Love Cooper. Love the mysteries that make you just hold on and wait with baited breath. Very good and highly recommended. When is the next one?
Rating:
Summary: Great!
Review: Just finished this book. Excellent. What sensitivity for the human condition; such understanding and empathy. Excellent mystery. Better than the first and can hardly wait for the third. Can only say ...wow... Love Cooper. Love the mysteries that make you just hold on and wait with baited breath. Very good and highly recommended. When is the next one?
Rating:
Summary: Dark and Disturbed
Review: The Peak District is a beautiful part of the world. Haunting, dark and mysterious. It's a tourist attraction that lures thousands every year. But it has also been used as a killing ground. A girl is found dead at a group of rocks known as The Nine Virgins. Even more disturbing is that it appears that her body has been arranged to look as though she is dancing. This is Stephen Booth's second book following on from Black Dog, and revisits Ben Cooper and Diane Fry. Apart from the mystery, this books concentrates on delving deeper into the characters introduced in the first book. The relationship between Ben and Diane is continually developed, as are the secrets they appear to be hiding. At some points, the murder case takes a secondary role to the characterisations. Because of this character development, I would recommend reading Black Dog before this book. It takes a while to really get going, as with many police investigations, but pretty soon things start coming together. A nicely woven mystery is unravelled with a few surprises, both pleasant and unpleasant, revealed along the way. The setting of the book is once again a powerful factor in setting the mood of the story, which is not what I would term upbeat. It always feels dangerous, dark and menacing - just like a good murder mystery should.
Rating: 
Summary: Goes down easily, quickly forgotten
Review: The thing that I remember most clearly about _Dancing with the Virgins_ is that both of the detectives in it were a little annoying. Not drunken and rakishly annoying to women, but fussy and disorganized and at least a little bit thick at times. It takes courage to not give in at the last moment and not make your heros larger than life, and Booth at least has that courage. I know that I enjoyed the book at the time-- it was a quick read and kept me well occupied in a week where I was sick, but the plot felt a bit overdone. And now that I sit (one week later) to write a review, I found it really difficult to remember who had done what to whom and why. A woman's body is found in a ring of standing stones which legend has it are the remains of Virgins caught dancing on a Sunday and turned to stone. Bound up in the mystery are a woman with a disfigured face found wandering in the same location, a very angry farmer on the brink of ruin, and a missing girl with dreadlocks who nobody seems to be able to identify. Even while still being at odds, Ben Cooper and Diane Fry need to work together to solve the mystery.
Rating:
Summary: Broken lives
Review: This brilliant book is a prime example why the British crime writers are superior to their American counterparts. The plot of this novel is dark and twisted and the characters fully devolped. Everything is unfolding slowly as it would in real life and real investigation. All the characters, even passers by, come to life, for a moment touch your heart and move on with their broken lives.
The plot driven books, as most of American crime writing is,can not compare. We have to stop aiming our books and movies only to people who have hard time focusing.Thank you Mr.Booth.
Rating:
Summary: Dancing With The Virgins
Review: This is a long, continuously rewarding whodunit, featuring two young detectives who do not get along. Sergeant Diane Fry and Detective Constable Ben Cooper have to work together to try to solve a murder near the Nine Virgins--ancient standing stones decorating the moors of the Peak District. They also have to link the murder to the hideous disfigurement of a woman who may have survived a first attack by the killer, though scarred Maggie Crew will never be the same and has very little memory of who attacked her. Through it all, Fry picks at Cooper's "naive" personality, while Cooper...well, I'm not sure that he does anything to justify Fry's critical remarks, so Cooper is technically the more sympathetic character, though maybe too wimpy? This book is packed with red herrings, but in superior story like this, you can't just call the red herrings red herrings. They are full fledged, highly involving subplots. What I mean is, the police connect victim Jenny Weston to a whole lot of strange people, with odd secrets. There's the nasty farmer, with the quiet, scared little boys, whose wife found Maggie Crews after she'd been slashed, and who is up to something sinister in his barn. There is Mark Roper, area Ranger, who may be dangerously manic about the rules, and who seems to know a secret about his lonely boss, Owen, who doesn't always answer his radio when he should. There's another missing woman, Ros Daniels, who may have visited Jenny Weston in her home, but if so, were they friends or enemies? The two main detectives--with some support from an extended cast of law enforcers, each with well-drawn personalities--bicker, and criticize each other (Fry gets especially incensed by Cooper's investigations beyond the obvious scope of the case; but then Ben Cooper is the one more likely to follow up a vague hunch that turns over the wrong rocks), but they do follow all the various trails left by all the colourful suspects, and naturally it can't all relate to the main chain of violence that cultivated in murder. In the end,I think some of the clues could be classified as a bit transparent by the adept mystery reader (though the large quantity of red herrings and smokescreening in the form of bona fide interesting subplots may help to counter this if, like me, you read too fast to do any really diligent sifting). I maintain that any stalwart ready to pounce on every apparent clue may pick out the real clues, especially the ones near the end of the book that do some last-minute "pointing" at the true culprit. Plus, I recall a few chapters--short ones in the first half or third of the book--that probably could have been cut. One short chapter basically focuses on Sgt. Fry driving somewhere after an intense interview with scarred and bitter Maggie Crew, and Fry's ruminations and reflections don't really add to the plot. I recall another chapter of a similar nature; mood and character are slightly attended to in ways that merely buttress what is already clear in other chapters, but overall a few chapters that could possibly have been eliminated, or just boiled down to a nub and summarized in a longer chapter. See if you spot this in two instances. But only two. Mostly, this crime novel is engaging from the get-go, with lots of details, and a powerful mood brought on by a simmering rural pot of explosive ingredients, where not just a murderer has something to hide.
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