2007 contemporary police mystery, third in Cleeves' Vera Stanhope
series. A few days apart, two unrelated people are strangled, a
troubled young man and a trainee teacher, and their bodies laid out in
water surrounded by flowers.
As seems to be becoming the pattern in this series, everyone has
secrets they'd rather not come to light—and only a tiny fraction of
them will be relevant. This is a pleasant change from the more usual
mystery-story pattern of doling out clues with reluctance: here almost
every scene contains a clue to something, but the vast majority of
them will turn out to be nothing to do with the case at hand (and many
of the secrets are not even criminal).
Cleeves' enthusiasm for birds shows up again, with the four principals
being a group of birdwatching friends. Meanwhile Stanhope the
detective is clearly sidling towards a breakdown, and is more or less
aware of it, but perhaps doesn't entirely care.
It's fairly clear who must have dunnit, but why takes longer to
resolve. Naq vs gur ybbal qvq vg, ur jnf ng yrnfg pnhfrq gb qb vg ol
fbzrbar ryfr sbe ragveryl engvbany checbfrf. As with the earlier
books, things often progress quite slowly with plenty of blind alleys,
but the writing is good enough that I found I really didn't mind.