It’s a Mystery: “The true art of memory is the art of attention”
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The Darkest Evening
By Ann Cleeves
Minotaur, 2020
This is the ninth novel by CWA Diamond Dagger Award winner Cleeves to feature feisty, fascinating Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope. As Cleeves describes her:
Vera is a competent and compassionate woman who hates to be patronized and so refuses to patronize her colleagues.... She looks more like a bag lady than a detective…. She hasn’t aged in real time…. This year with the publication of The Darkest Evening, she’ll come of age because The Crow Trap came out twenty-one years ago.
(Many of you may have watched the acclaimed “Vera” television series. Trust me, the books are well worth reading.)
The beginning finds her driving home from a pre-Christmas celebration with her co-workers through rural Northumberland in a blinding snowstorm. Though the road is one she knows well, she misses a turn and soon finds herself lost and disoriented. As she stumbles forward, she comes upon an abandoned car that has skidded off the road in front of her, its door left open. There is no driver around but strapped in the backseat is a whimpering toddler. Scooping up the child, she manages to gain her bearings and realizes she is near Brockburn, a once-stately home owned by distant Stanhope relatives she has not seen in quite some time. 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.” She leaves a note for the car owner with her card and heads for the house.
Her arrival coincides with the ending of what appears to have been a festive dinner. Vera’s cousin Juliet and Juliet’s husband, Mark Bolitho, were 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. The forecast of extreme weather quickly has everyone wanting to head home. Unfortunately, when one of the neighbors arrives to pick up his daughters, he discovers the body of a woman on the pathway headed towards Brockburn.
Before the storm escalates, Vera manages to assemble her loyal, if at times exasperated, homicide team to investigate what is now a murder case as the blizzard all too quickly turns deadly, trapping the group deep in the freezing Northumberland countryside. What follows is Ann Cleeves using the metaphor of the isolated and secluded village in which a killer resides to force Vera Stanhope to reacquaint herself with her father’s side of the family while also leaving no stone unturned to expose a murderer.
In the time honored tradition of Agatha Christie, among others, Cleeves buries a number of secrets amongst the isolated group. Some are related to the death of this young woman, while others are tantalizing red herrings that do much to turn the characters into flesh-and-blood people.
Since the investigation involves those from all levels of the social hierarchy in this small village, Ann Cleeves is able to make minute but significant observations about human interaction. One of her hallmarks is that the depiction of the investigation and the logical leaps made by the authorities must feel as authentic and accurate as is humanly possible. As is her wont, all the necessary clues abound for the canniest of readers to figure out. Of course, true to form, the clues are obfuscated successfully. She is a master of misdirection albeit that she never cuts corners on her way to revealing the culprit.
To date, Ann Cleeves has written nine Vera Stanhope novels. Her gift is that she manages to make each of them feel as fresh and exciting as when readers first met Vera back in The Crow Trap. The Darkest Evening is another page-turner from one of the best in the genre.
—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.