Scared to Live

Hope springs eternal, as does my need for reading material, so--despite last year's grumblings--I spent part of today reading Stephen Booth's seventh entry in his Cooper/Fry series, Scared to Live.  As is perhaps too often the case in detective fiction, Cooper and Fry start off pursuing what appear to be totally unrelated cases, only to find that there's a connection after all (although not the connection the reader immediately expects).  Over here, most of a family expires in a fire that turns out to be arson; over there, a very mysterious woman in her sixties dies by gunfire.  Later on, a man disappears with a small child, and a handsome Bulgarian police officer appears to educate our heroes on post-Communist organized crime.   In this novel, globalization is pressing heavily on Derbyshire: immigrants are on everyone's mind, the EU drives part of the plot, and the detectives have to ponder the likelihood that regional police jurisdictions might be vanishing.  Indeed, at times, England itself appears to be slowly sagging into oblivion under the weight of new residents, new technologies, and new world orders.

Has the jury reached a verdict? On the one hand, some things have definitely improved since our detective duo's previous outing.  Booth considerably moderates the angst; in fact, there are even signs that Fry and Cooper are beginning to (gasp!) get along.  We are spared unwieldy flights of philosophical fancy and are allowed, on occasion, to figure out a character's emotional state for ourselves.  Moreover, Booth handles his information dumps with rather more grace than before.  On the other hand, the plotting continues to wander like a lazy walk in the countryside, and I confess that I was somewhat...exasperated...by the wrap-up.   And while Booth no longer appears to be aping Reginald Hill, his prose style remains safely anonymous.  All in all, though, this was enough of an improvement that I'll be back for number eight.