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Product Description
Guilt, sacrifice and redemption in a freezing Derbyshire winter in this tense psychological thriller from the acclaimed author of 'Black Dog'. 'The sun had dropped over the edge of Irontongue Hill so that the snow-covered moor was in shadow ! but Marie Tennent would never see the dawn.' Marie's was not the only body lying undiscovered under the Peak District snow that January morning -- nor the first. In 1945, the wreckage of a bomber was found on the Hill, full of dead crewmen. The missing pilot was declared responsible, but why would a decorated hero desert? The only other survivor refuses to talk. A young Canadian woman has arrived to uncover the truth -- the pilot was her grandfather. DC Ben Cooper is intrigued. Perhaps he can help? To his boss DS Fry, investigating two frozen bodies found on the moors, her colleague's interest is entirely unprofessional. But the past has a way of influencing the present and before either knows it, a long-cold trail in the dead of winter has grown dangerously hot !
Amazon.com Review
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. But how they'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 Tongue is an ambitious and remarkably mature work that delivers on the promise Booth showed in his first novel, Black Dog. --J. Kingston Pierce
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