by Ann Cleeves
Part of Vera Stanhope
First published 2022
Vera Stanhope takes a rare day off. She crosses the tidal causeway to Holy Island, drawn by nothing more complicated than crab sandwiches. But standing on that beach, she is pulled back decades to another visit, when she was a teenager and her father Hector brought her along on what she thought was a simple day trip. That day, she watched Hector slip away to meet a woman on the beach. A stranger. No explanation given. Vera already knew her father kept secrets. Hector was that kind of man. But the teenage Vera could not let this one go. She started asking questions, pulling at threads, refusing to look away. She did not know then that this moment would mark the beginning of something larger than one afternoon's curiosity. Ann Cleeves traces the exact point where Vera's stubbornness and instinct first bent toward detective work. The story also includes an excerpt from The Rising Tide, the next Vera Stanhope novel, set on the same stretch of Northumberland coast.
Genres: mystery, crime, contemporary, adult-fiction, british-literature, detective
Vibes: atmospheric, character-driven, contemplative, introspective, nostalgic, suspenseful
Tropes: formative-moment, mystery-within-mystery, past-meets-present, unreliable-memory
Setting: Holy Island, Northumberland Coast, tidal causeway
Period: contemporary, flashback to teenage years
32 pages · Kindle Edition · Minotaur Books
Content warnings: death