Awful - Rated 
This is a very bad book. Poor in every way, including the worst way - it is downright dull. It is boring, uninteresting and I found it a real chore to get through. The earlier ones were average (at best) but still better. Avoid.
Not bad but not his best - Rated 
I enjoyed the first half of this book more than the latter. I think the best thing about Stephen Booth's novels is the very English-ness of them and the ordinary, person next door type baddies, and this is lost somewhat in this book with the introduction of the foreign gangsters. It's still quite a good read but not the best in the series. I thought the twist at the end was ok, though not entirely unexpected, I always suspected there would be a bit more to that particular charachter's motives than met the eye. All in all, fairly enjoyable but not as good as Blood on the Tongue.
An Exciting Read - Rated
A newspaper and magazine journalist for over 25 years, Stephen Booth was born in the English Pennine town of Burnley. He was brought up on the coast at Blackpool, where he began his career in journalism by editing his school magazine and wrote his first 'novel' at the age of 13.
Stephen gave up journalism in 2001 to write crime novels full time. He and his wife Lesley live in a former Georgian dower house near Retford, Nottinghamshire, in Robin Hood country.
To all intents and purposes it seemed like an ordinary accidental fire, but it had tragic consequences, a wife and two children dead. But for DS Diane Fry and DC Ben Cooper the ordinary always meant trouble. This is not the only trouble they are having to cope with and to try to get to the truth the two officers need to direct their search far beyond Derbyshire to the other side of Europe, where the customs are things an English mind does not comprehend . . .
Disappointing - Rated 
I have read all of Stephen Booth's previous Peak District novels and I enjoy the atmosphere he creates and the the way his main characters interact. But he seems to me to be always guilty of putting in rather more detail than necessary on surroundings and people's thoughts. This novel is no exception and would have benefitted from the culling of thirty or forty pages worth of unnecessary detail. This would have made the narrative tighter and more gripping. An example is a frantic chase towards the end of the story where the tension is suddenly suspended by nearly two pages of description of a room the chaser is running through.
The story itself is intriguing enough, but in the end the motives for the crimes committed are not particularly compelling. And a major twist at the very end is both silly and unnecessary.
Not bad but disappointing - Rated 
To a large degree I share the previous reviewer's disappointment with this book. I have been a huge fan of Booth since his first book, having felt that in all his books, notably the superb 'Dancing With The Virgins', he not only gives us an intriguing puzzle to solve, but also invests his characters, particularly Ben and Diane, with an emotional depth quite unusual for this genre, so his readers can invest in their lives and watch as they develop and deal with their problems and hang-ups from novel to novel. But there is little of that here. Apart from a few irrelevant (unless I have missed something) and clumsily unrealistic exchanges between Ben and his brother in which the latter torments himself with the fear that his young children may develop schizophrenia (!), there is nothing here to move the characters on. Symptomatic of this is Diane's sister Angie, who has featured quite prominently in the series but here is literally mentioned once in a couple of lines, as if at a late stage someone had reminded Booth that she was supposed to be living with Diane, so he'd better at least mention her in passing. Instead we get a tale of Eastern European gangsters (so ten-a-penny in crime fiction at the moment that they are becoming a cliche), baby trafficking, a Bulgarian detective flying over to offer his assistance (and whose ultimate motivation one can see coming a mile off) and people getting blown to bits on the streets of Chesterfield. Don't get me wrong; as a straight crime novel/whodunnit this is a good one. It's just that previous books in the series have been so distinguished that we have come to expect rather more from this writer, which is why the feeling of let-down is unavoidable.
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