THE DEAD PLACE

TITLE: THE DEAD PLACE
AUTHOR: STEPHEN BOOTH
Pages: 597
Date: 27/02/2009
Grade: 5
Details: no. 6 Cooper and Fry Mystery
Library

For the longest time this appeared to be a murderless mystery, which is quite an interesting idea, and worked really well. I can't say I missed the corpse(s) at all. At no point did the lack of a murder make this book less fascinating, rather the opposite really. The question as to whether or not a murder had been or would be committed was as intriguing as the traditional question of "who did it" would have been
D.S. Diane Fry is investigating two anonymous phone calls that talk about death, a dead place and an imminent murder. But since it's not clear if this is a real threat, her resources are limited.
At the same time, Ben Cooper is trying to discover the identity of a fully decomposed body that has been found in what turns out to be a case of body snatching; but by whom and why?
As always, Booth's story has lots of seemingly separate elements, which all come together beautifully in the end.