by Ann Cleeves
Part of Vera Stanhope
First published 2020
Vera Stanhope is not working today. She is walking around town, no case file in hand, no crime scene to reach. She steps into a new bookshop housed inside a renovated chapel, the kind of detour she would normally never allow herself. Then someone finds a skeleton in the old baptismal font. The body is not fresh. The bones belong to a mystery at least a decade old, one that went cold and stayed that way. Now Vera is standing right in the middle of it, off duty and unable to walk away. She starts pulling at threads. Old secrets surface. People who thought they were safe begin to worry. Vera is stubborn, sharp, and difficult to fool, and she does not let a case go just because it is inconvenient or old. The question driving this short story is simple: who put those bones in the font, and why did no one come looking sooner? The answer says something uncomfortable about what gets buried and what gets forgotten. This e-short from Ann Cleeves, a New York Times bestselling author whose work also airs as the television series Vera, is a tight introduction to one of crime fiction's most distinctive detectives.
Genres: mystery, crime, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller, detective
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, gritty, introspective, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: buried-secrets, cold-case-mystery, reluctant-investigator
Setting: bookshop, chapel
Period: contemporary, decade-old-mystery
22 pages · Kindle Edition · Minotaur Books
Content warnings: death, murder