The Darkest Evening

Starred review from June 8, 2020
CWA Diamond Dagger Award winner Cleeves’s superb ninth novel featuring astute, irascible Det. Insp. Vera Stanhope (after 2017’s The Seagull) finds Vera driving home late one night through rural Northumberland in a blizzard when she comes upon a car that’s slewed off the road. The driver is gone, but Vera discovers a toddler strapped into a car seat. Soon after she transfers the child to her own car, she realizes that she’s close to Brockburn, the once grand family home of the Stanhopes, and decides to go there. She last visited the place with her father when she was 15, and remembers that “the family had been unfailingly polite. That branch of the clan used politeness as a weapon of mass destruction.” At Brockburn, the abandoned car’s driver, a young woman, is found murdered behind the house. Vera assembles her loyal, if at times exasperated, homicide team to investigate, and comes to realize that the “whole case... was about families, about what held them together and what ripped them apart.” This fair-play mystery brims with fully developed suspects and motives that are hidden in plain sight. Skillful misdirection masks the killer’s identity. This page-turner is must reading for fans as well as newcomers. Agent: Sarah Menguc, Sarah Menguc Literary (U.K.).

June 1, 2020
When Vera Stanhope decided to seek a career as a copper, her father jeered she'd find real-life crime and criminals not at all like those in the Agatha Christie novels bookworm Vera so enjoyed. Now, after decades as a detective in the Northumbrian police, she knows the old man had it wrong. Even in bleak, icy northeastern England, there are country houses, vicars, privileged twits, murderers, and corpses waiting to be stumbled over. Cleeves has a fine time constructing a clockwork murder plot and using it to examine the lives in that circumscribed world. Inspector Stanhope looks, as she does in the celebrated TV series, "like a bag lady," and she edges near pathos as she makes her staff into the family she profoundly misses. Loneliness plays both sides of the aisle here, afflicting both Vera and the murderer she hunts. Those not wanting to wallow in the sociological side of this mystery should focus on Vera as she follows the clues, including the baby in the abandoned car. Remember to watch out for that avocado.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2020
A murder investigation hits close to home for an experienced police officer in the north of England. Taking a wrong turn in a snowstorm, Inspector Vera Stanhope finds a car with only a baby inside. With no cellphone service, she drives to the nearest house, which just happens to belong to her estranged relatives. Vera's cousin Juliet and Juliet's husband, Mark Bolitho, are giving a dinner party in hopes of courting prospective donors to support Mark's plan of converting their estate into an art center, promoting Mark's artistic interests and keeping the faltering estate alive. When a farmer tied to the estate discovers the body of a murdered woman in the snow near the main house, Vera becomes involved in a case that bring her closer to her only family. The car belongs to a retired schoolteacher who often loaned it to Lorna Falstone, the mother of a baby son. The suspects in her murder include the dinner guests along with Juliet's snobbish mother, Harriet, and Dorothy Felling, a superior housekeeper who lives with her husband and child in a tied cottage. It seems unlikely that a madman wandered out of the storm to kill Lorna, who's never identified the father of her child. After the baby is taken to Lorna's parents, who own a farm nearby, a second murder spurs Vera and her team to investigate a tangled web of family connections and buried secrets. Fans will enjoy matching wits with Cleeves' eccentric sleuth right up to the dangerous surprise in her denouement.

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September 25, 2020

DI Vera Stanhope rarely loses her way, literally or professionally. She knows her home patch in rural Northumberland intimately, but in a blinding blizzard she misses her usual turn for home. Struggling to find her way, she encounters an abandoned car on a snowy verge, its door open and a baby inside, with no sign of a parent. Worried, she leaves a note and her business card and takes the baby to a nearby manor house. Thus begins Cleeves's latest "Vera Stanhope" mystery (after The Seagull), set in and around a country house owned by a branch of Vera's own family. Her father, Hector, was in conflict with his elder brother whose family still live, in genteel poverty, in the crumbling estate. When the body of the baby's mother is found on the house grounds, Vera untangles family ties and a close-knit village community, and investigates a second death before bringing the murderer to justice. Family dynamics and issues of social class, both Vera's and others, dominate the story, and Vera must use all her intuitive skills to unravel the case. VERDICT Superbly drawn characters, an absorbing plot, and a compelling narrative combine in a classic mystery that will delight both Cleeves's fans and newcomers alike.--Penelope J.M. Klein, Edinburgh, Scotland

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