As a voracious reader, I’ve never felt bound to any one genre of publishing, though crime fiction certainly has primacy in my heart. He couldn’t imagine Nina Backworth watching old episodes of The Simpsons and laughing with him at the same jokes. A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Working with Sergeant Joe Ashworth, she starts the hunt for a murderer who is artistic as well as deadly. Speaking as a person who more or less devours large quantities of crime fiction – not to mention true crime – I find Vera Stanhope utterly unique.

The Glass Room by Ann Cleeves - Euro Crime Review - The Glass Room by Ann Cleeves - Euro Crime

AC, as usual, creates vivid imagery around the setting and includes interesting character interactions and internal dialogue along the way. Aside from Joanna and the Bartons, these suspects include two tutors, academic Nina Backworth and author Giles Rickard, and two students, mild-mannered ex-con Lenny Thomas and retired police officer Mark Winterton. This was another most satisfactory chapter in the life and times of Vera Stanhope and her trusty sidekick Joe.Taking account of this distinction I have some misgivings about the closing scenes of the investigation, and I had similar misgivings about 'Hidden Depths', the third Vera Stanhope novel. If, after reading the book, you disagree with any of my meanderings, I'd much appreciate your comments - to which I promise to reply. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. Artist and academic Lisa Perrin’s first book is a gorgeously illustrated and designed collection of biographies of that most romantic and maligned of villainesses: the poisoner.

The Glass Room: A Vera Stanhope Mystery Kindle Edition

These misgivings are the reason for the phrase 'not quite a classic' in the heading of the review - and also the reason for awarding four stars rather than five. The writing is excellent; the characterizations are wonderful -- nuanced and very credible (as usual); Cleeve's ear for dialog is terrific and her ability to conjure up atmosphere is spot on. People had been putting together stories of death and the motives for killing since the beginning of time, to thrill and to entertain. it's not as good as the other Vera's (for my taste) but it's still brilliant as is all of Ann Cleeves work. Yet so perverse are the wellsprings of human desire that the worse the idea becomes, the more power it exerts.The mysteries are always interesting with lots of red herrings which Vera worries away at with the reader egging her on. The police find that the evidence that seemed to incriminate Joanna in fact does not, so she is released and the course uneasily continues while the police examine the background and history of all their suspects (including Joanna of course). Ann Cleeves is always scrupulously fair in the construction of her plots; clues are seeded throughout the storyline and it's always possible to work out the likely killer - or it would be if we could only identify the clues and realise their significance! The Vera Stanhope novels are positioned somewhere between the second and third of these categories; it's obvious from the cast of characters that they have a foot firmly in the procedural camp, but they are also very clearly puzzles.