Blind to the Bones

As usual this novel by Stephen Booth is set in the Derbyshire Peak District.

On the dark Peak lies the village of Withens, populated mainly by the Oxley family, descendants of the first workers who tunnelled beneath the Peak.

When their cousin is battered to death and left on the moors for the crows, they stick together and refuse to co-operate with policeman Ben Cooper.

Detective Diane Fry is in Withens looking into the disappearance two years before of a student named Emma Renshaw. Her parents believe she is still alive and DC Fry cannot get through to them.

There are other twists and turns and secrets revealed, all in a dark brooding atmosphere. There seem to be two threads running through the book, but in the end we find they are linked.

The plot is good with an eerie atmosphere, although I found the book, with 473 pages, rather too long.

Pam Spencer

The Distant Echo

The past intrudes fatally on the present in Val McDermid's best crime novel since A Place of Execution.

The first half of this new hardback -- out on Tuesday -- is set in the 1970s when four university students find a dying girl.

All four boys have secrets to hide, and more than one knew the brutalised teenager, so the police see them as suspects rather than witnesses.

Then McDermid moves on two decades, as a "cold case" squad applies new scientific techniques to the old evidence.

The old friends find their lives turned over again, but this time not only the police have designs on the truth.

There are more deaths and a lot of anguish in this clever and credible whodunit before the true killer is finally masked.

McDermid's plotting is unsurpassed, her characters entirely believable, and her prose the most readable in crime fiction.

The Distant Echo, from the creator of TV thriller series Wire in the Blood, is a book to devour in one sitting.

David Knights