Telling Tales (Vera Stanhope, 2)

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I can't discuss more without giving out spoilers, but I loved how each and every character was penned . But Jeanie commits suicide in her prison cell, unable to face the people who had believed her capable of killing a child.

He and Vera end up making an unlikely friendship I thought with him doing what he could to help her out on the case, and Vera trying to not get too irritated with him. Demonstrating singular adeptness with mood and pacing, narrator Julia Franklin shines in this character-rich mystery set in northern England.Telling Tales is the second book in Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope series – which is now a major ITV detective drama starring Brenda Blethyn as Vera . Emma's parent's home seems cold and empty which was a perfect metaphor for what was going on with a lot of people. A particular joy in Telling Tales was that Vera made four big grand entrances within the first one-hundred-pages with her thick legs, shapeless Crimplene clothes, open toed sandals and blotchy skin. Excellently written and thought out in each detail with the characters playing their parts on the surface and uncovering their darker sides beneath. Things change one day when her husband James comes home on the news that the woman (Jeanie Long) who went to jail for murdering her best friend (Abigail Mantel)10 years ago has committed suicide.

Vera is genuine and astute, lacking in airs and graces and is often intrusive and tactless, but she also represents a brand of detective that the reader can identify with. She has twice been short listed for a CWA Dagger Award - once for her short story The Plater, and the following year for the Dagger in the Library award. Only my second Vera Stanhope book but strong writing, humanly messy characters and a sense of place are becoming the hallmarks of this series.I am afraid that even when Vera headed me in the right general direction I still picked the wrong individual as the guilty party. Vera and her sergeant, Joe Ashworth, come into the picture earlier in this book than the first, which I appreciated, but I would like a clearer vision of just who Vera is. Emma goes through the motions, smiles at the right places and plays the happy wife, but her dreams about the brooding and intense pottery maker who lives opposite, Dan Greenwood, are given more colour when she realises that he was a young sergeant and sidekick to the original investigator, Detective Inspector Caroline Fletcher. With each person's story revisited, the Inspector begins to suspect that some deadly secrets are threatening to unfurl. Emma Bennett and Abigail Mantel have developed a sort of close friendship or at least Emma would like to think it was close.