All this, yet I will not say that I disliked the novel.

What might feel like a filled-out story in the hands of other writers seemed here like too much plot for one book, and although it was difficult for the police officers to ferret out the truth, it was also hard for me to follow too many strings through a long maze of pages. The subplots involve a Bulgarian police officer, human smuggling, a mentally ill character non-compliant with his meds, and a baby of uncertain origins. Scared to Live involves two major crimes: what seems like a professional killing of a reclusive middle-aged woman in a home that resembled a fortress, and a house set alight deliberately, and in which smoke inhalation killed a woman and two of her children. In this instance, Stephen Booth’s book did not flow in a way that I liked, rather it felt staged and each new step felt laboriously constructed. It stretches my ability to believe in the story that I’m reading my imagination does not keep up with the tale being presented to me. I’m not sure that I like crime novels where two crimes in a small town turn out not merely to be related, but to connect with international criminal rings.

Scared to Live by Stephen Booth, 2006, 230 pages. And his next victims could very well be the only two cops who can stop him. Now, as Cooper faces the reemergence of a dark secret he'd hoped to forget, and Fry copes with problems both personal and professional, a horrific possibility begins to take shape: What if the two investigations are somehow connected? A mysterious and unpredictable killer is on the loose.

the night of the fire, and was it really the flames that killed his family? But as the debris is cleared, troubling questions remain in the ashes-among them, how did the blaze start, where was the husband at two a.m. With no friends, no family, and virtually no contact with the outside world, the dead woman may simply have been the unlucky victim of a random homicide.Īt virtually the same time, a raging house fire claims the lives of a young mother and two of her children. How do you investigate the murder of a woman without a life? That is the challenge facing Cooper and Fry when a reclusive agoraphobic is found shot to death in her home.