2005 contemporary police mystery, second in Cleeves' Vera Stanhope
series. Ten years ago, Emma's friend Abigail was murdered, and Emma
found the body. The woman convicted of the crime always maintained her
innocence… and now she's hanged herself. Old secrets will be dug up
once more…
And hoo boy there are a lot of them. Emma's husband is a pilot
working on the Humber (the story is set in a small village near the
river mouth), and he has secrets. Her parents live nearby (her father
got a bad case of God and moved the family to the middle of nowhere),
and they have secrets. Abigail's father has secrets, as did Abigail
herself. The original conviction was desperately unsafe, but it meant
a child-murder was followed by an imprisonment, so nobody asked too
many questions at the time. And so on…
There's an awful lot to unravel here, in fact, lots of lovely deep
people with nobody an unmixed hero or villain, and my only real regret
is that we don't get to see the ends of all their stories too. We do
get plenty of Vera Stanhope, using her lack of charm as an
investigative tool, but even she has some dark nights of the soul on
her way to the eventual resolution.
As in The Crow Trap Vera makes a relatively late entrance, and we
spend quite a bit of narrative time with other people. Also as in that
book, one can't help get a certain impression from Cleeves that most
of the stupid, as opposed to merely greedy, things that men do come
from wanting the wrong woman.
It's all quite slow-paced even though the book isn't particularly
long, and it rewards a bit of a wallow. No need for an action-packed
climax here: Vera's detective work is not the flash of inspiration but
the mechanical inevitability of sorting things out. Recommended.
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