Dancing with the Virgins

Virgins%20pb
Originally uploaded by chronicbooker3

Late last fall I was looking for a new (to me) mystery series to follow. I'm partial to British settings when I read mysteries, and years ago fell in love with Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks series. I had tried the Rebus novels by Ian Rankin thinking that the Scottish settings would pull me in, but I found Rankin's character of Rebus and his style of writing just a bit to dark for my taste. Someone (and I can't remember who) suggested Stephen Booth. Booth's books are set in Britian, mostly (so far) in the Peak District . Booth 's main protagonists in these novels are Ben Cooper an almost 30 copper from the local area and the newly transplanted Sergeant Diane Fry.

In Booth's second novel of this series "Dancing with the Virgins" again takes place in and around the Peak District. The Virgins are a set of nine stones placed in a circle with the tenth stone set off to the side. Legend had it that nine village maidens had been caught dancing on the Sabbath and had been turned to stone for their sin and that the tenth stone (the fiddler that played for them) had been dealt the same fate. When the partially naked body of a woman turns up in the circle, Fry and Cooper must solve what seems to be a senseless crime .

I enjoyed watching the relationship start to take shape between Fry and Cooper on a professional level and wonder just how far on a personal level these two will evolve. Opposites may or may not attract in this case?? Don't let this fool you into thinking that this series is more about love interests then mystery and suspense. Booth writes without pleasantries and places the facts in the readers face - cold and unflowered - at times with description unwanting.

My only complaint would be that with the large amount of key characters in this book, I sometimes found it hard to keep them all in place. Nonetheless, I am eager to continue this series that I am sharing with my friend Enza (cestmoi).