"Highly recommended - a great series!" - Seattle Mystery Bookstore

"Ben Cooper and Diane Fry are the most interesting crime team to arrive on the mystery scene in a long while." - Rocky Mountain News

"One of our best story tellers." - Sunday Telegraph

"There are few, if any, contemporary writers who do this as well as Stephen Booth." - Arena magazine

"Booth is a modern master of rural noir." - The Guardian

"Booth delivers some of the best crime fiction in the UK." - Manchester Evening News

"Stephen Booth has to be one of the best new English mystery writers." - Toadstool Bookshop, New Hampshire

"Booth's aim is to portray the darkness that lies below the surface... in this he succeeds wonderfully well." - Mark Billingham, author of the DI Tom Thorne series

"If you read only one new crime writer this year, he's your man." - Yorkshire Post

For their help in the writing of this novel, I'm grateful to:

Mr F.G. Cejer, Secretary of the Derbyshire branch of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, for information on Polish language and customs

Inspector Tony Eyre, of Derbyshire Constabulary, for advice on police procedure

Lincolnshire Aviation Heritage Centre, for a ride on a Lancaster bomber

In memory of Eric Jefferson

BLOOD ON THE TONGUE

1

It was an hour before dawn when Detective Constable Ben Cooper first began to get the news. An hour before dawn should be the dead hour. But in the bedrooms of third-floor flats on the council estates, or in stone-built semis in the hillside crescents, there were people blinking in bewilderment at an alien world of deadened sounds and inverted patterns of dark and light. Cooper knew all about the hour before dawn, and it was no time of day to be on the streets. But this was January, and dawn came late in Edendale. And snow had turned the morning into shuddering chaos.

Cooper pulled up the collar of his waxed coat to meet the rim of his cap and brushed away the flecks of snow that had caught in the stubble on his jawline, where he had rushed shaving that morning. He had walked down one of the alleyways from the market square, crunching through fresh snow, slithering on the frozen cobbles, passing from light to dark as he moved out of the range of the street lamps. But he had stepped out of the alley into a noisy snarl of traffic that had choked the heart of Edendale and brought its snow-covered streets to a halt.

On Hollowgate, lines of frustrated motorists sat in their cars, boot to bonnet in clouds of exhaust fumes. Many of them had been driving almost blind, their windscreens covered in half-scraped snow or streaks of brown grit that their frozen wipers couldn't clear. The throbbing of engines filled the street, echoing from shop facades and the upper storeys of nineteenth-century buildings. Headlights pinned drivers and their passengers in cruel shadows, like silhouettes on a shooting range.