The second case involves the death of a mother and her two young sons in a house fire. The police are treating the deaths as suspicious. The father had left the house earlier to join a friend at the local pub and the couple’s youngest child, an eighteen-month-old girl was at her grandparents’ home at the time of the fire. Although the fire was essentially confined to the sitting room, the boys and their mother, asleep in their bedrooms, died from smoke inhalation.

As the investigation proceeds Fry and Cooper experience their usual inability to really cooperate with each other. Fry is Cooper’s superior but she will be forever the outsider in the district. The success of much of the police work done in the Edenville area of Derbyshire depends on relating to the local farmers and small landholders. For Cooper, the son of a local policeman, the local networking comes as second nature. Fry is a city girl, is not comfortable chatting with people, and is just marking time until she can be transferred to another position in a big city. Since this novel is the seventh in a series the duo has had plenty of practice tiptoeing around each other. It is interesting to mark their progress (or lack thereof).

Through Cooper the author is able to give his readers a good sense of life in rural England. There is the increasing difficulty for the farmers to make a living, the problems with land conservation, animal poaching, and exotic animals (in this case wallabies) escaped from a local zoo during the Second World War and are now competing for food with indigenous species.

The nature of the crimes provides another venue for Booth to expand his readers’ knowledge. Remodeling, or as the British would say, refitting, a home reeks havoc with smoke alarms if dust and dirt accumulates within them. In addition, how smoke accumulates on windows can give clues to the fire’s origin.

As is true of earlier books in this series, Booth carefully and lovingly describes the countryside. Not only the terrain and natural detail, but the buildings, climate and weather give a vivid picture to the mind’s eye. Historical figures important to the area complete the travelogue.

The scope of this novel becomes international when it becomes evident that immigrant Bulgarians play important roles in the plot. As a result, readers learn about Bulgarian history, what happened to the country with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the desperate methods people will use to make money, or merely to keep themselves alive.

Scared to Live is much more than an entertainment though it surely is that. It is a learning experience. Knowledge of conditions and activities that in fact exist in the real world (apart from the author’s mind) are sure to elicit emotions of a varied nature in every reader of this book. Many times after a few books in a series the content will become somewhat stale. The plots are eerily similar to ones already written. Scared to Live is not one of those books. It is one of the best books Mr. Booth has ever written  

--Andy Plonka