2012 contemporary police mystery, fifth in Cleeves' Vera Stanhope
series. One of Vera's neighbours has vanished from her house, so Vera
tracks her down… to a writing retreat, just in time for the discovery
of the body.
Of course Cleeves indulges in a certain amount of needling about
mere crime writing versus Serious Literary Fiction; this is what
detective writers do when they write about writers, after all, and
she has fun with it. There's very little about the practicality of
writing, though, and much more about the sorts of people who think
they might be writers.
Vera's neighbour Joanna becomes the prime suspect through having been
on the scene, though that's soon cleared up (I'd ideally have liked a
bit more on how she and others feel when she comes back to the retreat
having left with everyone assuming she was a murderer). Another death
follows, and this time the scene is carefully arranged to match the
writing sample that another writer on the course had read out on the
previous night. That other writer, Nina Backworth, provides this
book's main secondary viewpoint; mostly, though, this is a story of
slogging police work that doesn't lead to much, followed by a
revelation to which the reader is not made privy which leads to Vera
setting a trap.
(And I rather think there is an inconsistency about where someone was
at a particular time, which leads what would otherwise be an obvious
and correct connection to be dismissed—and that inconsistency is never
mentioned. Qvq Yhpl Jvagregba xvyy urefrys juvyr ng havirefvgl va
Znapurfgre, nf vf vavgvnyyl fgngrq (naq purpxrq ol gur vairfgvtngbef),
be juvyr ng Fg Hefhyn'f va Ybaqba ba gur ZN pbhefr eha ol gur svefg
ivpgvz, nf unf orpbzr gur gehgu ol gur raq bs gur obbx?)
That sort of thing is frustrating to me, but I don't think that's the
only reason I found this book rather edgy and unpleasant compared with
the rest of the series so far. Still good, still mostly enjoyable, but
I wouldn't want to have gone into it without already being familiar
with the investigators from earlier books.