Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves

EXCERPT: ‘You should find yourself a good woman.’
He paused before speaking and she waited, expecting some confidence, but obviously he thought better of it. ‘Yeah, well. Easier said than done. I’ve never had much luck in that line.’
He looked straight up at her. Those dark eyes that made you think like something out of a soppy magazine.
I’d be your woman. Good or bad. Only no man has ever wanted me. The words came suddenly into her head and she was shocked by their bitterness. She turned away. Outside the light had almost gone and the street was quiet. There was a smell of woodsmoke. Not from a bonfire. There’d be wood-burning stoves in the big houses on the other side of the square. It was a wealthy village this, she thought. It wasn’t showy like the estate where Fletcher lived, but there was plenty of money around. As she waited to cross the road, Ashworth pulled up. While he was parking she watched a group of girls in school uniform come out of the post office with cans of coke and bars of chocolate. She wondered what they’s do in a place like this for a good night out. All kids liked to take risks, but until the murders you’d have put this down as one of the safest places on earth. So what would they do? Hang around each other’s houses looking for porn sites on the internet? Drink too much? Have sex with unsuitable lads? A girl like Abigail Mantel must have been bored silly here. What games had she been playing to bring a bit of excitement to her life?

ABOUT ‘TELLING TALES’: Telling Tales is the second book in Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope series. Ten years after Jeanie Long was charged with the murder of fifteen-year-old Abigail Mantel, disturbing new evidence proving her innocence emerges in the East Yorkshire village of Elvet. Abigail’s killer is still at large. For Emma Bennett, the revelation brings back haunting memories of her vibrant best friend – and of the fearful winter’s day when she had discovered her body lying cold in a ditch. Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope makes fresh inquiries, and the villagers are hauled back to a time they would rather forget. Tensions begin to mount, but are people afraid of the killer, or of their own guilty pasts?

MY THOUGHTS: Telling Tales, although part of a series, is easily read as a stand-alone.

Vera is away from her home territory in Telling Tales, and not entirely comfortable with it. She needs to be north of the Tyne for it to feel like civilization to her. She has been brought in to make fresh inquiries into an old case; reopened when the woman convicted of the murder commits suicide and new evidence comes to light which proves her innocence. Joe Ashworth is by her side to help in the investigation.

Vera is quite candid about her own shortcomings – particularly with the opposite sex. She is a lone woman, not necessarily lonely, but fond of a dram or two to keep the cold at bay. She is very good at what she does, but Joe is more the diplomatic side of the pairing. Vera is blunt and to the point, yet at times she can be quite charming. That’s when she is at her most dangerous. She has a great understanding of human nature. Astute, with great powers of observation. Her appearance and demeanor often give suspects the wrong impression of her. She’s overweight, scruffy, comes across as a bit of a female Columbo. But she’s also quite capable of scaring the bejesus out of a suspect!

I loved the resolution to this particular murder-mystery. I never suspected . . .

⭐⭐⭐⭐.5

#TellingTalesVera Stanhope @anncleeves

THE AUTHOR: Ann grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. Her father was a village school teacher. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs – child care officer, women’s refuge leader, bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard – before going back to college and training to be a probation officer.

While she was cooking in the Bird Observatory on Fair Isle, she met her husband Tim, a visiting ornithologist. She was attracted less by the ornithology than the bottle of malt whisky she saw in his rucksack when she showed him his room. Soon after they married, Tim was appointed as warden of Hilbre, a tiny tidal island nature reserve in the Dee Estuary. They were the only residents, there was no mains electricity or water and access to the mainland was at low tide across the shore. If a person’s not heavily into birds – and Ann isn’t – there’s not much to do on Hilbre and that was when she started writing. She describes a couple of her early books as seriously dreadful!

DISCLOSURE: I own my copy of Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves.