Stephen Booth’s Cooper & Fry Series: The “Darkness Lurking Underneath” England’s Peak District

British writer Stephen Booth was a journalist for twenty-five years before turning to fiction. In 2000, his debut novel, Black Dog, marked the arrival in print of his best known creations — two young Derbyshire police detectives, DC Ben Cooper and DS Diane Fry. Black Dog was the named by the London Evening Standard as one of the six best crime novels of the year, the only book on their list written by a British author. In the USA, it won the Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel and was nominated for an Anthony Award for Best First Mystery. The second Cooper & Fry novel, Dancing with the Virgins, was shortlisted for the UK’s top crime writing award, the Gold Dagger, and went on to win a Barry Award for the second year running.

Booth has turned a novel a year in the series since its inception; the eleventh Cooper & Fry novel, The Devil’s Edge, came out this year in England. All the critically acclaimed Cooper & Fry books are set in England’s Peak District.

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Nashville off the Charts: The Taylor Jackson Crime Novels of J.T. Ellison

J.T. Ellison is the international award-winning author of seven critically acclaimed novels, multiple short stories and has been published in over twenty countries. A former White House staffer, she has worked extensively with the Metro Nashville Police, the FBI and various other law enforcement organizations to research her novels. She lives in Nashville with her husband and a poorly trained cat, and is hard at work on her next novel.

Ellison is the author of the crime series featuring Nashville homicide detective Taylor Jackson. The series opened with the 2007 work, All the Pretty Girls, a novel lauded by BookPage: “Ellison does a skillful job of capturing the city and its flavors, while taking the police procedural out of its usual New York/Los Angeles/Chicago big-city milieu and placing it in a mid-sized, vibrant Southern city. She’s populated her novel with believable players, on both sides of the law.” The Cold Room, the fourth in the series, won the 2011 ITW Thriller Award for best paperback original. Seventh is the series, Where All the Dead Lie, is just out, and has also been praised by the critics, including Publishers Weekly, who felt that “the growing suspense will keep readers glued.”

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