2015 contemporary police mystery, seventh in Cleeves' Vera Stanhope
series. In rural Northumberland, the house sitter for the local Big
House is found dead beside the road, though it's not a hit and run.
When his flat is checked, there's another corpse, and the only thing
that seems to connect them is an enthusiasm for moths.
When reviewing the previous book in the series, Harbour Street,
I complained that I didn't feel I'd been given the tools to solve the
mystery. And I'm afraid the same thing happens here: a specific
connection between murderer and victims, which is what gives
everything away, is not revealed or even hinted at until the whole
thing is resolved. One can speculate without it, of course; indeed,
this time I had correctly picked a prime candidate for murderer on the
basis of other evidence. But without it there's a gaping hole where
the motive should be, and that's not the way I like to play the game.
(Given that the police have done background checks on everybody
involved, it also seems very unlikely that this particular bit of
information wouldn't have come up right at the start.)
There's another problem, which is that while we have often been told
before that Vera is fat and ugly, I felt that the the frequency of it
had been significantly turned up. We're not constantly being reminded
of the physical appearance of the other investigators, and while I can
concede the literary ancestry of the Great Detective with a drawback
which means they aren't such a success in things that aren't
detection, I found this particular instance heavy-handed.
Now you might say that all this shouldn't be a problem, because
there's more to a mystery story than playing the game and following
the Great Detective; there are all the ephemeral and minor series
characters whose problems we will meet and get involved in. (A soap
opera with occasional murders, perhaps.) And those are jolly good: the
centre of this story is the set of three retired couples living in a
farm converted to houses, with the tasteless social climber, the
surprisingly good amateur painter, the ex-restaurateurs whose daughter
is about to come out of prison, and so on; among the police, one
investigator is having serious doubts about staying in the job at all.
But the book ends with a confrontation with the murderer and a
resolution of that matter, and while some of the other stories get
some little closure if I'd been reading just for the people I suspect
I'd still have been disappointed.
Still a good book, particularly where it's dealing with Vera's
assistants (though the narrator of the audiobook, who's good on the
local accents, voices Holly, a well-brought-up woman from down south,
as an Essex girl). But I didn't feel the enthusiasm that I have with
earlier entries in the series.