The search for her killer is what constitutes the plot of Black Dog, but – as in really all good crime fiction – the search for the perpetrator is not really the main focus either: That is only incidental, what drives the plot forward, a plot whose chief function, however is to cast light on the psyche of the characters entangled in it, and of the society those characters move in.

And Stephen Booth really does do the spirit of the place justice – his descriptive passages catch the beauty of the landscape and conjure vivid images of the environment.īut as this a crime novel, the depiction of scenery, however gorgeous it might be, is not really the focus of the novel which becomes clear very soon when the search after a disappeared fifteen-year old girl turns up her dead body. It appears to be quite well-known though, as Wikipedia tells me it is the site of Britain’s first national park and a very picturesque place and a brief image search at Google does indeed confirm that the scenery is beautiful. Stephen Booth’s Cooper and Fry series looked promising, so I decided to give its first volume, Black Dog, a try.īlack Dog is set in an area called the Peak District which I am somewhat embarrassed to admit to never have heard before. Now that I’m about to catch up on Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins series (just one more novel to read left there), it’s time to look for a successor, which in this case mean a series of crime novels with a focus on British village life which is the aspect I always enjoyed most with the Merrily Watkins novels.

Black Dog by Stephen Booth