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    Scared to Live
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    Scared to Live
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    Scared to Live
    Ebook550 pages7 hours

    Scared to Live

    By Stephen Booth

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    A dark psychological thriller featuring Diane Fry and Ben Cooper, in which a small community is ripped apart by arson and murder. ‘Ingenious plotting and richly atmospheric’ – Reginald Hill.

    An assassination in the night – an open window and three bullets from the darkness – the victim a harmless middle-aged woman. But can she really be quite as innocent as she seems? The death of Rose Shepherd swarms with questions – unlike the deaths of a woman and her two children in a house fire. A tragedy, yes, but an everyday one.

    Then DS Fry discovers a link between the two cases, a link that crosses the borders between nations, between right and wrong, between madness and sanity. She and Ben Cooper discover why some people are scared to live – and others are fated to die…

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateFeb 2, 2009
    ISBN9780007279692
    Unavailable
    Scared to Live
    Author

    Stephen Booth

    Stephen Booth's fourteen novels featuring Cooper and Fry, all to be published by Witness, have sold over half a million copies around the world.

    Read more from Stephen Booth

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    Reviews for Scared to Live

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      Scared to Live by Stephen Booth, 2006, 230 pages. I’m not sure that I like crime novels where two crimes in a small town turn out not merely to be related, but to connect with international criminal rings. It stretches my ability to believe in the story that I’m reading; my imagination does not keep up with the tale being presented to me. In this instance, Stephen Booth’s book did not flow in a way that I liked, rather it felt staged and each new step felt laboriously constructed. Scared to Live involves two major crimes: what seems like a professional killing of a reclusive middle-aged woman in a home that resembled a fortress, and a house set alight deliberately, and in which smoke inhalation killed a woman and two of her children. The subplots involve a Bulgarian police officer, human smuggling, a mentally ill character non-compliant with his meds, and a baby of uncertain origins. What might feel like a filled-out story in the hands of other writers seemed here like too much plot for one book, and although it was difficult for the police officers to ferret out the truth, it was also hard for me to follow too many strings through a long maze of pages. All this, yet I will not say that I disliked the novel. Until the insane web of coincidences descended on the story, I was enjoying the book, especially the depiction of Ben Cooper, the detective with country roots, an exceptionally three-dimensional character whom Booth has painted well. Booth also handled skillfully the mentally-ill character, showing a compassion and understanding of psychosis and hallucinations that is rare in novels. It’s not a book I would rush to recommend, but those who like complicated thrillers would probably enjoy it very much. I like crime novels that are simpler in their plotting, which is why I read Stephen Booth rarely. This book was not a bad read, but it isn’t memorable either.
    • 3/5
      Although I enjoyed this latest in the Cooper and Fry series, and will be awaiting the next quite eagerly, I found [book: Scared to Live] a bit disappointing. Perhaps it's because I figured out the Big Surprise at the end of the book several chapters in advance. The book deals with the murder of a mysterious, reclusive woman, to which Cooper is assigned, and also with the arson death of a woman and two children, which Fry investigates. Not surprisingly, the cases turn out to be related, and both have a connection with Bulgaria. Suspects proliferate and witnesses fail to tell the whole truth for reasons of their own. Issues that crop up in the cases under investigation also resonate strongly with Cooper's and Fry's own personal issues. Somehow it just didn't come together quite as well as Booth's previous books did for me. I hope he's not getting tired of the series.
    • 4/5
      Another great episode with Fry & Cooper; how long can Booth keep Diane in Derbyshire though? First time I've wondered if the characters weren't becoming a little stale. Good story that goes off where you aren't expecting it to.
    • 4/5
      "Scared to Live" maintains the high standards of Stephen Booth's earlier Derbyshire detective novels. Cooper and Fry are likeable characters, in the sense of being enjoyable to read about, even if they are not exactly mould breaking. There are couple of really good dramatic moments involving a tower and a river flowing beneath an old cotton mill. I would tend to agree with the reviewer who said that you know who the bad guy is quite early on, were it not for the fact that there is more than one bad guy in this story. There are definitely two murderers, neither of whom I guessed, but I I had a rough idea of the final twist almost as soon as the character involved appeared. That didn't, however, lessen my enjoyment of the book.I like the way Booth mixes real and fictional places and manages to drop in all sorts of interesting trivia and topicality, for example, a piece of trivia about how the route of the M1 crosses back and forth across county borders is referred to in order to suggest there might be some logic to proposals to merge the Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire police forces. Proposals that, as far as I know, were shelved. I am not so sure about the claim that phone boxes were painted red in order to stand out in remote areas, I had always assumed that red was used simply because it was the colour associated with the Post Office which originally ran telephone services in Britain.
    • 5/5
      #7 in the Ben Cooper & Diane Fry series. A house fire results in the death of a mother and two of her children, and a reclusive woman is shot dead when standing at her bedroom window. DS Fry is called to the house fire, DC Ben Cooper to the shooting. But inevitably the cases they are working on become connected. An excellently stimulating read.I think there are a couple of things that make this series different* I am struck by the fact that the language is "ordinary" i.e. everyday words particularly in the dialogues* the nasty cop/nice cop routine comes out strongly too in the partnership of DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper. She is without doubt the nasty one, putting people offside all the time, but also asking the hard questions and pointing out the things that others gloss over. He is the intuitive one. You see that also in Dalziel and Pascoe but I actually think Stephen Booth does it better* Cooper and Fry often act in ignorance of each other's discoveries but the reader is omniscient, with the opportunity to solve the conundrums before either of the detectives* and finally there are some open ended questions. Times when the answers are not so readily forthcoming..
    • 5/5
      A complex story bringing characters from Eastern Europe and Europol into fictional, sleepy Edendale. Ben Cooper and Diane Cooper are now well-established, filled-out and believable characters, about whom you care. Another cracking contemporary story from Stephen Booth