For years my friend Don and I have traipsed the desolate Northumberland hills with Vera Stanhope and her crack investigative crew as they track down the remarkable number of killers who inhabit this north eastern part of England. We have followed Vera on Masterpiece Mystery, BritBox, and Acorn TV but never, until this weekend, have I actually read one of Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope mysteries. More fool me!
“The Darkest Evening” is simply wonderful on several levels. First, I couldn’t for the life of me, figure out who the murderer was even though when we watch on TV I am so good that I’ve been named an honorary DCI. Second, the novel portrays a much more nuanced portrait of the enigmatic Vera because Cleeves takes us inside her head and allows us to hear her inner musings. Third, Vera’s sidekick Joe, who only seems to act as her foil in the televised drama, is a more fully drawn, interesting character in the book.
Lorna Falstone, the young woman found lying in a snowy field on the Brockburn estate, head brutally bashed in, was by all accounts a lovely girl who had overcome a serious illness to give birth to Thomas and was thriving as a working mother on her own. So when Vera comes upon a car in a snowy ditch as she trundles home from work one evening in a blizzard, she is stunned to see a toddler who we will learn is Thomas, tucked into his car seat in the back of the abandoned vehicle.
Soon Vera and her colleagues, Joe Ashworth, Holly Jackman, and the entire forensic team are ensconced in the kitchen at Brockburn Hall where a too-good-to-be-true domestic worker, Dorothy Felling, takes charge of the baby, feeds the police crew, and continues to serve an elegant dinner to the owners of the manor and their guests in the formal dining room.
What a shock for Joe and Holly when they discover that the hall is owned by the oldest and once wealthiest family in Northumberland, the Stanhopes, a fact that Vera plays down even as the idea that this murder happened on the property where her dad Hector, the black sheep of the family, grew up. Difficult memories of her father’s death from alcoholism and the loneliness that has followed her and probably informed her ability to completely thrown herself into her work all her life, rise to the surface and help readers see Vera as more than the brusk, no-nonsense Columbo-like investigator that she is.
Ann Cleeves is brilliant at recreating the small-town atmosphere that gives rise to class distinctions (who owns the land, who works it), the neighborly gossip and chit-chat, and the secrets and resentments that the people hold close. It’s a pure joy to watch Joe, Vera, and Holly go about their work, wheedling their way into kitchens and living rooms, gently prying various tidbits from each of the suspects until they arrive at the whole picture.
But don’t mistake Cleeves, who also wrote the engrossing Shetland series featuring Detective Jimmy Perez, for a cozy mystery writer. Her novels delve into the darkest realms of human nature and we often aren’t a very pretty species.
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