The Dead Place

Stephen Booth's sixth novel, The Dead Place, once again features DC Ben Cooper and DS Diane Fry in lukewarm (purportedly hot) pursuit of a mysterious and rather pretentious killer--someone obsessed with both death and decomposition.  There are undertakers, professors of thanatology, crypts, various people in various stages of various deaths, the odd budgetary crisis, jokes about CSI: Miami, and pigs' teeth.  And, of course, the usual assortment of vaguely quirky policemen.

This is an oddly lackadaisical novel.  Despite everybody's supposed anxiety that the Killer Will Strike Again, there's little tension; the prose has almost no sense of urgency.  Things simply meander on for over 450 pages.  Moreover, while Booth clearly wants to write character-driven mysteries, Cooper and Fry have already subsided into predictable tics: Cooper is quasi-saintly and often melancholic, Fry is bitchy and always on the verge of exploding.  These are characterization flaws, not character flaws.  (It might help if Booth would jiggle his series calendar along: only a year has passed since the first book, which makes character development painfully incremental.)  To make things worse, the continuing friction between the two characters rests almost entirely on one or the other of them not saying something important; this type of conflict eventually ceases to drive the story forward and starts to drive the reader batty.  Finally, Booth hasn't yet developed an identifiable style or learned to create truly evocative settings.  He would be advised to refrain from philosophical asides.  Too often, his characters utter bathetic platitudes when they're trying to be "deep": "'We know so little about death.  But the fact is, most of us know even less about love'" (454). 

As my reader has no doubt noticed, I found this installment quite frustrating.  I'm not quite willing to write the series off, but Booth hasn't yet found a truly striking voice of his own.