a bit disappointed but will try the next ( )

Overall this was good, if a little clunky in places due to the head jumping between Cooper and Fry. It feels overly long as well at over 500 pages, a bit too much descriptive text throughout. The grumpy old man dialogue from Harry is very authentic and engaging, but it's a shame Fry's backstory/motivation is such a tired trope for a female protagonist. Still, that could have been handled worse. Torn between three and four stars, went with three. ( )

I imagine that this is TV series in the UK now.

A popular local bobby teamed up with a hard bitten female detective insepctor from the big smoke. There is all the frission you’d expect from this kind of typical male/female pairing set in a crime/detective genre.

To be honest I really like this series. Set in the Peak District, the land becomes another character who is both good and evil by turns, sometimes helping the good guys sometimes hindering them.

There is always a sub-story in his books. In this one it is about the number of plane crashes that have happened there. Factually it is mind boggling how many people have died in plane crashes there. Apparently a thing of the past with modern techology and GPS navigation.

Plane crashes in the peak district:

here and here ( )

I read another book in this series a while ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. Now I'm going back to read the books in order. I love the well developed characters, even the ones I dislike. The story progresses logically and I did not guess who the criminal was before the end. I have never visited the Lake District but the descriptions are beautiful. ( )

This novel is the first in a series of detective mysteries set in the Peak District and featuring DCs Ben Cooper and Diane Fry. A 15 year old girl is murdered and as the police try to find out who did it and why, they are hampered by the secrets being kept by many of the villagers, as well as their own personal demons.

There was a lot to like about this novel; I enjoyed the setting, which is obviously somewhere well known to the author, and he shows his knowledge through the Cooper character – Ben is a native Peak District inhabitant and knows the area like the back of his hand. Fry has recently transferred to the area from the West Midlands Police Service – for reasons that become apparent late on in the story, although hints are dropped here and there beforehand – and is therefore not as knowledgeable about either the area or the local people. Both are quite spiky characters, although Ben is infinitely more likeable. There are also other characters, mainly their colleagues, who I imagine will also feature in future novels in the series.

The mystery itself was well drawn and I didn’t guess the ending, which was a pleasant surprise, especially as it wasn’t outlandish (I hate it when you read a mystery where the ending turns out to be something completely out of left-field which no reader would have been able to guess; happily that wasn’t the case here).

My only slight niggle with this novel was that I felt there was a fair bit of unnecessary overly descriptive pieces, and I did think that it could have done with a bit of editing. But it’s the first book in a series and also the author’s debut novel, so I will be interested to see how the characters and how the writing develops.

I will be reading more books in this series, and I would recommend this novel to fans of the mystery genre. ( )