Blood on the Tongue:  A Crime Novel
The weather is cold and the clues no warmer as Peak District detectives  Ben Cooper and Diane Fry tackle a medley of mysteries--each one knottier than  the last--in English author Stephen Booth's haunting third novel,Blood on  the Tongue. The unidentified body of a dead man has turned up on a frosty  roadside. An abused woman is found curled in the snow on nearby Irontongue Hill,  an apparent suicide. And there's the lingering puzzle of a Royal Air Force  bomber that crashed into Irontongue back in 1945, killing everyone on board  except for the pilot, who reportedly walked away from the wreckage... and was  never heard from again. With leave and sickness decimating the ranks of the  Edendale police force, all hands are needed to solve the modern deaths. But  constable Cooper finds himself distracted by the World War II tragedy, in large  part because of a beguiling young Canadian, the granddaughter of that missing  pilot, who's come to Edendale determined to clear her ancestor's name.Not surprisingly, these various cases eventually intertwine. Buthowthey're linked by time and tragedy provides the intrigue here. Equally involving  is the prickly alliance between Cooper, the "too bloody nice" local lad, and his  superior, the emotionally guarded outsider, Fry. Plotted for maximum  psychological suspense, teeming with singular secondary characters, and  capitalizing on Britain's still-poignant memories of the last world war,Blood on the Tongueis an ambitious and remarkably mature work that  delivers on the promise Booth showed in his first novel,Black Dog.--J. Kingston  Pierce