Black Dog (Cooper and Fry Crime Series, Book 1)

by StephenBooth (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2000

  $3.25

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $3.25

  Combining the qualities of Reginald Hill, Minette Walters and Barbara Vine, Black Dog is an amazingly assured and impressive debut thriller from the most promising new author to emerge in the genre in recent years. 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.

• New

  Paperback
  2001

  $13.87

  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...