Stephen Booth Books in Order (Updated September 10, 2026)

Stephen Booth is best known for the Cooper and Fry crime series, eighteen novels set in and around England’s Peak District. The books follow Derbyshire detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry, whose sharply different personalities develop alongside investigations shaped by villages, moorland, caves, farms, folklore, tourism, and the difficult geography of the national park.

The series begins with Black Dog and currently ends with Fall Down Dead. Booth also wrote the Ben Cooper novella Claws and the standalone crime novel Drowned Lives, set around Staffordshire canals rather than the Peak District police world.

Publication order is the best reading order because Cooper and Fry’s ranks, family situations, working relationship, personal losses, and views of each other change considerably across the series.

Begin with Black Dog, Not a Later Peak District Case

Many Cooper and Fry novels have self-contained murder investigations, so it is possible to understand a later book on its own. Starting at the beginning is still preferable because the real long-running story is the relationship between Ben Cooper and Diane Fry.

Ben grew up in rural Derbyshire and understands its people almost instinctively. Diane arrives as an outsider, more ambitious, guarded, skeptical, and often frustrated by Ben’s reliance on local knowledge and empathy.

That contrast changes over eighteen books rather than resetting after each investigation.

Cooper and Fry Books in Order

1. Black Dog (2000): The body of missing teenager Laura Vernon is found in the Peak District, bringing detectives Ben Cooper and Diane Fry together for a case involving family secrets, local loyalties, and a community that knows more than it wants to say.
2. Dancing with the Virgins (2001): A woman is attacked near an ancient stone circle and another is found murdered, forcing Cooper and Fry to investigate violence around one of the Peak District’s most atmospheric prehistoric landscapes.
3. Blood on the Tongue (2002): A winter investigation links a dead man found in the snow with the remains of an aircraft lost decades earlier, combining a current death with buried wartime history.
4. Blind to the Bones (2003): The disappearance of a young woman and another violent death take Cooper and Fry into an isolated Derbyshire community where family loyalties and suspicion of outsiders make information difficult to obtain.
5. One Last Breath (2004): A convicted murderer released from prison returns to Derbyshire, reopening questions about the crime for which he served time and whether the original investigation found the whole truth.
6. The Dead Place (2005): Diane Fry receives disturbing calls from a man predicting murder while Ben Cooper discovers bones belonging to a woman who was supposedly cremated, sending both detectives into cases shaped by death and the people who work around it.
7. Scared to Live (2006): The shooting of a reclusive woman and a suspicious house fire involving a mother and children reveal a pattern that eventually takes Cooper and Fry beyond Derbyshire into an international investigation.
8. Dying to Sin (2007): Building work at isolated Pity Wood Farm uncovers a preserved human hand and then two bodies buried years apart, leaving Cooper and Fry dependent on memories in a community reluctant to discuss its past.
9. The Kill Call (2009): Hounds discover a murdered man on a Derbyshire moor, but an anonymous caller reports the body in a different location, drawing the investigation into hunting, horse theft, the meat trade, and the history of Eyam.
10. Lost River (2010): The death of a woman near an underground water system and another case outside the familiar Edendale setting force Cooper and Fry into investigations where hidden geography becomes as important as visible evidence.
11. The Devil’s Edge (2011): A dead cyclist near a remote village leads Cooper into a place with its own rules, old grievances, and a reputation for handling problems without relying on outsiders.
12. Dead and Buried (2012): A fire destroys a Peak District pub associated with an earlier murder case, and the discovery of human remains in the ruins forces Ben and Diane to reconsider what happened there years before.
13. Already Dead (2013): After devastating personal loss, Ben Cooper struggles to function while the discovery of a man’s body in floodwater gives Diane Fry another investigation in a landscape overwhelmed by rain.
14. The Corpse Bridge (2014): A body found near an ancient packhorse bridge draws the detectives into disputes over land, history, local traditions, and people who believe the past gives them claims the modern world ignores.
15. The Murder Road (2015): A woman’s death near a Derbyshire road known for fatal accidents leads Cooper to question whether local stories about a dangerous stretch of countryside are masking a human killer.
16. Secrets of Death (2016): A surge in suicides at scenic Peak District locations creates an uncomfortable problem for police when evidence suggests that at least some of the deaths may not be voluntary.
17. Dead in the Dark (2017): The disappearance of a man years earlier returns to attention when new evidence suggests that someone close to the old case has been hiding information all along.
18. Fall Down Dead (2018): Walker Faith Matthew falls to her death on Kinder Scout during thick fog, but Ben Cooper suspects the supposedly accidental mountain death was murder while Diane Fry faces a separate internal-investigations crisis.

Current series status: Fall Down Dead remains the eighteenth and latest Cooper and Fry novel as of September 10, 2026.

Black Dog Establishes the Cooper and Fry Contrast

The first book begins during a hot Peak District summer with the disappearance of teenager Laura Vernon.

Her body is eventually discovered in countryside that appears peaceful to visitors but is filled with local relationships, family tensions, class differences, and people accustomed to keeping private matters private.

Ben Cooper approaches those people as someone who understands the area from the inside. Diane Fry does not share that familiarity and is more willing to distrust what locals present as ordinary behavior.

The investigation therefore introduces both the murder-series structure and the professional tension that becomes as important as the individual crimes.

The Landscape Becomes Part of Every Investigation

Booth rarely uses the Peak District as decorative scenery. Geography repeatedly determines how crimes happen and how investigators understand them.

• Stone circles: Dancing with the Virgins uses prehistoric monuments and exposed upland terrain.
• Snow and aircraft wreckage: Blood on the Tongue links a modern death with history preserved in a winter landscape.
• Remote farms: Dying to Sin depends on an isolated agricultural community and bodies hidden in the ground.
• Plague history: The Kill Call uses Eyam and the way old catastrophe becomes modern heritage.
• Floodwater: Already Dead turns prolonged rain into part of both the investigation and Ben’s emotional state.
• Kinder Scout: Fall Down Dead uses fog, height, exposure, and walking routes to make an apparent accident difficult to reconstruct.

Dancing with the Virgins through Blind to the Bones

The next three books establish the early pattern of the series before Ben and Diane’s personal histories become more dominant.

Dancing with the Virgins centers on violence around an ancient stone circle, where the landscape carries meanings older than the present investigation.

Blood on the Tongue uses a harsh winter and a decades-old aircraft loss to show how the Peak District preserves history physically in its terrain.

Blind to the Bones shifts attention toward an isolated community where outsiders encounter resistance and where family identity matters enough to interfere with straightforward police questioning.

One Last Breath Reopens an Old Murder

The fifth Cooper and Fry novel begins with a familiar crime-fiction problem: a man has already been convicted and served time.

His release should represent the end of the legal process. Instead, his return creates new danger and forces investigators to question whether the original case was ever as secure as everyone believed.

The story also deepens the sense that crimes in Booth’s books rarely remain contained in one moment. Convictions, family memories, and old police decisions continue affecting people years later.

The Dead Place Uses Two Disturbing Mysteries at Once

Diane Fry receives anonymous calls from a man claiming that another killing is coming.

His warnings become harder to dismiss after a woman disappears from a multistorey car park.

At the same time, Ben Cooper is dealing with bones apparently belonging to Audrey Steele. Her family has a problem with that identification because Audrey died naturally eighteen months earlier, was cremated, and had her ashes scattered.

Both investigations lead toward people whose daily lives revolve around death, funerals, bodies, or the physical aftermath of dying.

Scared to Live Takes the Case Beyond Derbyshire

A reclusive woman is shot through an open bedroom window in a quiet village.

Elsewhere, Diane Fry examines the burned remains of a home where a mother and two children died.

The deaths initially look separate. Their connections eventually force Cooper and Fry to look beyond the Peak District and into a wider European criminal trail.

The book also develops Diane’s personal life through an unexpected connection with a Bulgarian police officer.

Dying to Sin Turns a Farm into a Cold Case

Building work at Pity Wood Farm uncovers a human hand preserved in clay.

Police excavation then reveals two bodies buried years apart.

The farm once relied on poor and transient laborers, which creates a painful possibility: people could disappear without enough social connections for anyone to push authorities to look for them.

Cooper becomes convinced there may be a third body and that understanding who worked at the farm is essential to solving the deaths.

The Kill Call Mixes Murder with Rural History

Foxhounds discover the body of a well-dressed man whose head has been crushed.

An anonymous caller then reports the same body lying half a mile from where it was actually found.

The contradiction pulls Cooper and Fry through hunting, hunt saboteurs, horse theft, business interests, and a little-known part of the meat trade.

Ben also investigates historical connections around Eyam, where the seventeenth-century plague has become part of modern tourism and community identity.

From Lost River to Dead and Buried

The middle period of the series widens the kind of landscapes Booth uses while continuing to develop Cooper and Fry separately as well as together.

1. Lost River: underground water, caves, and hidden routes make geography part of a case whose answers cannot be found only on the surface.
2. The Devil’s Edge: a remote community with strong internal loyalties challenges the assumption that official investigators automatically have the right to every answer.
3. Dead and Buried: a destructive fire and human remains force the detectives to revisit an earlier place of violence and reconsider what was left unresolved.

Already Dead Changes Ben Cooper

Already Dead is particularly important for character continuity.

Ben is coping with a devastating personal loss and is not functioning with his usual emotional stability. The condition of the flooded Derbyshire landscape mirrors a life that has become difficult to navigate.

Diane Fry continues working while Ben’s future in policing becomes uncertain.

This is one of the strongest reasons not to jump randomly among the later books. Ben’s circumstances after this point carry consequences into subsequent installments.

The Corpse Bridge through Secrets of Death

1. The Corpse Bridge: murder around an old bridge draws modern police into disputes shaped by land, inheritance, folklore, and competing claims about the past.
2. The Murder Road: a dangerous road associated with repeated deaths forces Cooper to separate local legend from deliberate human violence.
3. Secrets of Death: scenic Peak District locations become associated with apparent suicides, creating the possibility that someone is exploiting places already linked with voluntary death.

Dead in the Dark

Dead in the Dark turns back toward an old disappearance.

A man vanished years earlier, leaving behind uncertainty rather than a solved homicide. New evidence forces investigators to reconsider the people around him and the assumptions that allowed the case to remain unresolved.

The mystery depends on the difference between a missing person and a confirmed victim. Without a body or reliable account of what happened, every person connected with the disappearance has had years to construct a version of events.

Fall Down Dead Brings the Series to Kinder Scout

The eighteenth novel uses one of the Peak District’s best-known landscapes.

A walking group led by Darius Roth is caught in thick fog on Kinder Scout. Faith Matthew falls to her death, and the conditions make an accident entirely plausible.

Ben Cooper nevertheless finds details that trouble him. As he looks more closely at the hikers, several turn out to have possible reasons for wanting Faith dead.

Diane Fry, meanwhile, is dealing with an internal-investigations problem capable of involving Cooper as well.

Latest Cooper and Fry novel: Booth’s own website still identifies Fall Down Dead as the latest series installment in September 2026.

Where the Claws Novella Fits

• Claws (2007, novella): Ben Cooper becomes involved in a shorter Peak District investigation that gives him the central role and can be read as supplementary material alongside the main Cooper and Fry novels.

Claws is not one of the eighteen full-length Cooper and Fry novels.

For publication-order readers, it fits naturally around the period of Scared to Live and Dying to Sin. Readers who want only the main novels can skip it without breaking the primary sequence.

Drowned Lives Is Separate from Cooper and Fry

• Drowned Lives (2019): Council officer Chris Buckley dismisses an eccentric old man’s request for help ending a long family feud, but after the man is murdered Chris begins investigating and uncovers a dangerous secret buried in the history and mud of Staffordshire’s canals.

The novel moves from Derbyshire to Staffordshire, particularly the area around Lichfield.

Its background is the history of Britain’s inland waterways, from the eighteenth-century canal boom through industrial decline and later restoration for leisure use.

Chris is not a detective. He is an ordinary council officer who becomes involved because he initially refuses to help the old man and then feels compelled to understand the murder that follows.

Standalone: Ben Cooper and Diane Fry do not need to be read first.

Stephen Booth Fiction in Publication Order

1. Black Dog (2000): Ben Cooper and Diane Fry investigate the murder of missing teenager Laura Vernon.
2. Dancing with the Virgins (2001): Violence around an ancient stone circle turns prehistoric landscape into a modern crime scene.
3. Blood on the Tongue (2002): A winter death connects with an aircraft lost decades earlier.
4. Blind to the Bones (2003): A disappearance and killing expose difficult loyalties inside an isolated Derbyshire community.
5. One Last Breath (2004): The return of a convicted murderer reopens questions surrounding an old case.
6. The Dead Place (2005): Anonymous predictions of murder intersect with bones that should not exist.
7. Scared to Live (2006): An assassination and deadly house fire reveal an international pattern of killing.
8. Claws (2007, novella): Ben Cooper takes the lead in a shorter supplementary Peak District case.
9. Dying to Sin (2007): Human remains buried at Pity Wood Farm reveal years of concealed deaths.
10. The Kill Call (2009): A murdered man, contradictory location report, hunting culture, and Eyam history create a complex rural case.
11. Lost River (2010): Underground geography and hidden water systems shape another Cooper and Fry investigation.
12. The Devil’s Edge (2011): A remote village with strong internal rules resists outside explanations of a violent death.
13. Dead and Buried (2012): A fire exposes remains and forces the detectives to return to an earlier unresolved crime scene.
14. Already Dead (2013): Floodwater and murder coincide with one of the most difficult periods of Ben Cooper’s personal life.
15. The Corpse Bridge (2014): A body near an old bridge connects murder with land, history, and local belief.
16. The Murder Road (2015): A supposedly dangerous road may conceal a murderer rather than a supernatural curse or pattern of accidents.
17. Secrets of Death (2016): Apparent suicides at beauty spots raise the possibility of deliberate killing.
18. Dead in the Dark (2017): New evidence reopens a disappearance that has remained unresolved for years.
19. Fall Down Dead (2018): A fatal fall on fog-covered Kinder Scout may have been carefully disguised murder.
20. Drowned Lives (2019): Chris Buckley investigates a murder connected with family history and Staffordshire canals.

Ben Cooper and Diane Fry Are Not a Romantic Pairing Formula

The title Cooper and Fry can make the series sound like a conventional detective partnership in which two complementary investigators eventually become personally inseparable.

Booth uses a more difficult relationship. Ben and Diane respect some of each other’s abilities, disagree deeply about other things, compete professionally, and often understand Derbyshire through opposite assumptions.

Diane’s ambition and guarded personality also take her career in directions different from Ben’s. By the later books, their connection is shaped by years of conflict and shared history rather than a simple partner formula.

Can the Cooper and Fry Books Be Read Out of Order?

A reader can follow many individual murder plots without previous books, but jumping around creates avoidable spoilers about promotions, relationships, family events, trauma, and whether characters remain in the same jobs.

This becomes especially important around Already Dead and the books that follow it.

Publication order is therefore the recommended first-read sequence even when a particular mystery sounds more appealing than the earlier cases.

What Is Stephen Booth’s Latest Book?

Drowned Lives, published in 2019, is Booth’s latest full-length novel overall.

Fall Down Dead, published in 2018, remains the latest Cooper and Fry novel.

Booth’s official website was updated in September 2026 and still presents Fall Down Dead as the latest Cooper and Fry installment. No nineteenth novel had been announced there by September 10, 2026.

Cooper and Fry Reading Questions

What is the first Stephen Booth novel?

Black Dog, published in 2000, was Booth’s first novel and the first Cooper and Fry book.

How many Cooper and Fry novels are there?

There are eighteen full-length novels, ending with Fall Down Dead.

Should Cooper and Fry be read in order?

Yes. Publication order is recommended because Ben and Diane’s careers and personal lives continue across the series.

Is Claws a full Cooper and Fry novel?

No. Claws is a shorter Ben Cooper novella and is supplementary to the eighteen main novels.

Is Drowned Lives part of Cooper and Fry?

No. It is a standalone novel featuring council officer Chris Buckley and is set around the Staffordshire canal network.

Where are the Cooper and Fry books set?

They are primarily set in Derbyshire and the Peak District, using fictional communities alongside recognizable landscapes and real regional history.

What is the latest Cooper and Fry book?

Fall Down Dead, published in 2018, remains the latest series novel as of September 10, 2026.

What is Stephen Booth’s latest novel overall?

Drowned Lives, published in 2019, is his latest full-length novel overall.

A Peak District Reading Route That Preserves the Character Arc

Read Black Dog through Fall Down Dead without rearranging the novels. The murder investigations change, but the cumulative story of Ben Cooper and Diane Fry depends on what each has already survived.

Add Claws around the middle of the series if you want the shorter Ben Cooper material. It is optional rather than necessary for understanding the full-length books.

After finishing Fall Down Dead, read Drowned Lives as a separate crime novel. Its canals, industrial history, family feud, and ordinary civilian protagonist provide a different setting while retaining Booth’s interest in how landscapes preserve secrets from the past.