The Devil’s Edge
by Stephen Booth
Sphere pp352
ISBN: 978-1847444790

There is no doubt that today the boundaries for crime fiction are continually expanding and the possibilities for crime writers seem endless because the genre is so vibrant and diverse.

Stephen Booth, a magazine and newspaper journalist for over 25 years, wrote his first novel when he was only 13. Today he is the international award-winning author of the Ben Cooper and Diane Fry series which was marked by the arrival of Black Dog in 2000.

The starting point in Mr Booth’s crime novels is not “plot” but “character” and thus, the reader is inclined to react to the characters as if they were real people. Because of this, his writing is often compared with fellow Brits Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. Nevertheless, I found The Devil’s Edge, his latest Cooper and Fry book, a disappointing read.

Generally, in his crime novels, Mr Booth maintains a narrative drive and makes it entertaining for the reader. At the same time, his creation of police detectives like Ben Cooper and Diane Fry wills us to explore the hidden depths of these characters’ lives. Additionally, the author skilfully portrays every person in his prose with all their faults and frailties, their emotions and vulnerability. There are no heroes in his books or even any complete villains. Not one person is entirely innocent, and the guilty are victims themselves in their own way. Therefore, there is no black and white but instead, only shades of grey.

However, the major flaw in this text is that the storyline takes too long to develop and this is what fails to keep the reader’s attention. Unlike several of his other books in the series, The Devil’s Edge is not a gripping story and this risks the reader getting easily distracted.

Like the rest of the series, The Devil’s Edge is set in England’s atmospheric and beautiful Peak District. Once the plot does begin to finally take shape, just as with Cooper and Fry’s previous investigations into a major crime, all the stones are turned over, dark secrets are revealed, and entirely innocent people are drawn in.

What differs between the character portrayals of Cooper and Fry in the text is that Cooper is the local lad, born and raised in the Peak District, whose father was a police sergeant and a local hero. Everyone knows him and he understands the minds of the locals. Fry, on the other hand, is an outsider who has arrived from a big city force. She is ambitious and not interested in establishing new friendships but in advancing her career. Yet in spite of her hard-edged exterior, as readers we are encouraged to understand her, even if we do not take a liking to her. This creates a gender role reversal in which Cooper is the sensitive, intuitive one who cares about the people he comes across in his job, while Fry is much tougher and hard-edged.

Sadly, The Devil’s Edge does not show Mr Booth as being on top of his game and, because of this, the novel does not qualify as a masterly display of the crime-writing genre. The author equally fails to balance memorable characterisations with a convincing narrative. The dialogue is not always plausible and this makes it difficult to connect with the various characters’ personas. Worse still, not all loose ends are tied up. However, what gives the novel its strength is that the emphasis in the story is not only on the assessment of evidence and its interpretation in order to solve a mystery, but just as much on the actions taken.

• Ms Montanaro has a PhD in British Surrealism and Psychoanalysis from the University of Edinburgh.

This book is available at Word for Word.