by Ann Cleeves
Part of Vera Stanhope
First published 2014
Christmas in Newcastle. Detective Joe Ashworth and his daughter Jessie are riding the Metro home through heavy snow when the train grinds to a halt. The other passengers spill out into the storm. One woman stays seated: Margaret Krukowski, elderly and well-dressed, stabbed to death in a packed carriage while no one saw a thing. DI Vera Stanhope catches the case and feels the familiar pull of something complicated. She is glad for the excuse to skip the holidays. Vera and Joe travel to Mardle, the south Northumberland town where Margaret lived, and start asking questions. The answers come slowly. Then a second woman is killed. Vera is certain the two deaths are connected. To understand the new murder, she has to understand what was weighing on Margaret before she died. The trail keeps circling back to one address: Harbour Street. The people who live there know more than they are saying. Vera keeps pushing. What she finds buried in the neighbourhood's past is the thing everyone there has worked hard to keep quiet. Ann Cleeves builds the tension through accumulation, detail by detail, until the silence of an ordinary street becomes its own kind of confession.
Genres: mystery, crime, contemporary, british-literature, thriller, detective
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, gritty, suspenseful, tension-building
Tropes: buried-secrets, community-mystery, unreliable-witnesses
Setting: Newcastle, Mardle, South Northumberland, Harbour Street
Period: Christmas, Contemporary
400 pages · Paperback · Macmillan
Content warnings: murder, violence