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Sue Green

Dying to Sin
by Stephen Booth
HarperCollins,  HK$208
Small towns and isolated communities - places where events are contained and emotions can fester without moderating outside influences - have been the setting for Stephen Booth's Cooper and Fry detective series since it began eight books ago.
Booth  knows well that the picturesque small town, the village where everyone supposedly knows everyone, is fertile ground for the crime writer seeking to probe the dark side of human behaviour.
Despite having stuck with his young detectives, Sergeant Diane Fry and Constable Ben Cooper from Derbyshire's atmospheric Peak District, and never having published standalone works, Booth hasn't fallen into the trap of so many successful crime-series authors who go through the motions to feed a voracious fan base. He tackles contemporary issues, keeping his work fresh and lively.
In Dying to Sin the continued viability of small farms is a central theme and Booth portrays with grim veracity the bleakness of both the rain-sodden landscape and the lives of two dysfunctional brothers whose aptly named Pity Wood Farm is the focus of his story.
The plight of migrant workers is highlighted when a young man working with a team of migrants on a farmhouse being rebuilt unearths a hand. The police, digging in the mud, find the rest of the body and another, apparently buried later. When Cooper and Fry begin to investigate they uncover a legacy of decades of abuse of migrant workers from poor European countries.
Booth's series was successful from the outset: its debut with Black Dog in 2000 won major awards and sold around the world.
Since then he has developed his two main characters and their personal lives - a rather uninteresting romance with a scene-of-crime officer for Ben; a complex and vexed relationship recently renewed with a wayward sister for Diane - though the other police regulars remain peripheral and somewhat thin.
But generally Booth tells his story well; his descriptive powers are part of the reason for his success. He knows this unforgiving terrain (he lives nearby) and paints grim word pictures as his whodunit unfolds.
Booth has said that when he has met his contract obligations to produce another two Cooper and Fry books he may leave his series to develop some of his many ideas that it cannot accommodate.
He is a  masterful storyteller who shows signs of becoming trapped by his own creation.  It will be a treat for crime-fiction fans to see where else he can take them.



Dying to Sin