Celebrated detective Vera Stanhope has a new case. Book reviewer ANNA CREER says it’s “a classic Vera story set against the wild, ancient landscape of Northumbria”. 

Anne Cleeves has been writing her critically acclaimed crime novels since 1986. 

She has created three memorable and distinctive detectives, Vera Stanhope, Jimmy Perez and Matthew Venn, who can be found on TV in Vera, Shetland and The Long Call.

Although Vera on TV is coming to an end, Vera will live on in fiction and The Dark Wives has arrived to prove it.

The Dark Wives is set shortly after The Rising Tide (2022), in which one of her team died and Vera is still guilt ridden. Joe Ashworth “thought guilt was like a weight on Vera’s shoulders. Physical. It made her seem stooped and old. Never before had he thought of Vera as old.”

A university student is discovered murdered outside Rosebank, a care home for disturbed teenagers. Josh Woodburn worked at the home but hadn’t arrived for his evening shift. At the same time 14-year-old Chloe disappears from the home. 

Chloe has left a diary entry in which she reveals that she had been close to Josh, writing: “I think I could be in love with him”. Vera doesn’t think Chloe could have killed him, but it’s November, dark and cold, and she needs to be found.

The new case and the urgency of finding Chloe energises Vera, as she welcomes a new member to her team. DC Rosie Bell is from Newcastle, “brash and loud”, who enjoys “a night out with the lasses on the Quayside, eyeing up the footballers, getting pissed and rowdy”. 

She admires Vera, considers her “a bit of a legend” and aims to learn from her. However, she proves herself invaluable when interviewing those affected by Josh’s death.

The search for Chloe eventually leads to Gillstead, a hamlet in a valley, with a few farms, a pub, one street of cottages and on the fell, three standing stones, The Dark Wives. The legend tells of three crones who had been turned to stone by a giant who thought they talked too much.

Chloe’s grandfather still owns a “bothy” there, somewhere to camp out, which Chloe had loved as a child. There, Vera makes a grim discovery and is convinced the murderer is searching for Chloe as avidly as the police.

Vera on the page is quite different from the screen version. She’s physically bigger with a more dominant personality and she’s secretive.

The Dark Wives is a classic Vera story set against the wild, ancient landscape of Northumbria. There’s a very obvious plot flaw, but you can forgive it because you get to spend time with Vera and that’s special.

KATE Atkinson is one of the world’s foremost novelists, winning the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year Award with her first novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995).

Two of her three critically acclaimed novels set around World War II, Life after Life (2013) and God in Ruins (2015) were both winners of the Book of the Year awards.

Her best-selling crime novels, featuring a former police detective turned private investigator, became the BBC TV series Case Histories, starring Jason Isaacs.

In Death at the Sign of the Rook, Jackson Brodie returns. He’s now over 60 and a grandfather, living in Yorkshire and driving a Land Rover Defender, a supercharged V8, “the whole macho construct only slightly spoiled by his granddaughter’s baby seat in the back”.

Brodie is employed to investigate the theft of a painting by the Padgetts. Their mother has just died and they suspect her carer, Melanie Hope, of stealing the Renaissance portrait of Woman with Ermine, which their parents had bought in a stately home auction in 1945. But Brodie can find no evidence of Melanie Hope’s existence.

Meanwhile, in Burton Makepeace House, “one of the greatest houses in the north, second only to Chatsworth… Vanburgh designed the house and Capability Brown landscaped the grounds”, Dowager Lady Milton is mourning the loss of her housekeeper, the ultra efficient Sophie Greenway two years ago. Sophie had taken with her the Milton’s Turner, the last of their valuable paintings, the rest having been sold to pay taxes and roof repairs.

In a classic Christie climax, Atkinson gathers her eclectic cast of characters at Burton Makepeace House at a murder mystery evening, while a snow storm rages outside. 

As a further complication, an axe murderer has joined them leading to a tense, action-packed finale. It’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.