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Silent Voices
Ann Cleeves
2013, 314 pages
Fiction
Here’s a British mystery writer with a new protagonist, DI Vera Stanhope, who has many personal issues. She’s a lonely, single, overweight, unattractive, uncouth middle-aged woman who’s a crack detective inspector. When she stumbles upon a dead body in the sauna of the fitness club she’s recently joined, she thinks it might simply be a death from natural causes. Of course it turns out it was murder. Now it’s up to Vera and her sergeant, a good-looking younger married man aspiring to Vera’s job who puts up with all her quirks, to follow the web of connections in the present and the past among the residents of Barnard Bridge, along with a couple more bodies, to figure out who the killer is. There are numerous sub-plots, past and present, that in the end do tie all together, but you’ll still be guessing who the guilty party is until the very end.
Recommended for fans of Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters, or other British police mystery writers like Martha Grimes or Elizabeth George or Peter Lovesey.
