Black Dog

Black Dog
Stephen Booth

Dark, intense and utterly compelling, ‘Black Dog’ was an extraordinary first novel from a writer who has rapidly become the most promising crime author to emerge in the genre in years.‘Where Cooper stood was remote and isolated … but the smell that lingered under the trees was of blood’The long hot Peak District summer came to an end when they found Laura Vernon's body. But for local policeman Ben Cooper the work has just begun. His community is hiding a young girl's killer and a past as dark as the Derbyshire night. It seems Laura was the keeper of secrets beyond her years and, in a case where no-one is innocent, everyone is a suspect.But Cooper's local knowledge and instincts are about to face an even greater challenge. The ambitious DC Diane Fry has been called in from another division, a woman as ruthless as she is attractive…

BLACK DOG

STEPHEN BOOTH

DEDICATION (#ulink_2da23bd1-d39f-5390-b1df-8fb52a476912)

For Lesley

EPIGRAPH (#ulink_f5afe9f7-54dc-5c82-a058-6a83bfc88f48)

black dog: 1. melancholy, depression of spirits; ill humour. In some country places, when a child is sulking, it is said ‘the black dog is on his back’.

(Oxford English Dictionary)

CONTENTS

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The sudden glare of colours beat painfully on the young woman’s eyes as she burst from the back door of the cottage and hurled herself into the brightness. She ran with her bare feet slapping on the stone flags and her hair streaming in red knots from her naked shoulders.

A harsh voice was cut off suddenly when the door slammed behind her, isolating her from the house. As she sprinted the length of the garden, she stirred the dust from a flagged path whose moisture had been sucked out and swallowed by the sun. A scarlet shrub rose trailed halfway across the path and a thorn slit the flesh of her arm as she brushed against it, but she hardly felt the pain.