Crime mystery set in Newcastle (“secrets are all I have left”)
- Book: Harbour Street (Vera Stanhope #6)
- Location: Newcastle upon Tyne
- Author: Ann Cleeves
D.I. Vera Stanhope knows her stuff, she actively engages in her cases, but she follows her intuition too. She has built up a small, select team around her on whom she can rely: Detective Joe Ashworth is her sidekick, upon whom she can really depend and Holly is her glamorous assistant, who simply wants to know she is doing things right. But Vera struggles to know how to handle her. These two women are afterall chalk and cheese, one young and pretty, the other older and struggling with her weight and alcohol consumption, gauche at times, uncomfortable with overt intimacy, but her wealth of experience, authority and instinct are the great assets that help her manage her team. She is very much in the business of: “Clearing unpleasantness from the streets so that respectable people could continue their daily lives in blissful ignorance”.
A Metro train (Newcastle upon Tynes’s subway) comes to a grinding halt due to the snowy weather conditions, the passengers are decanted into buses, but one passenger remains seated. Joe and his daughter happen to be travelling in the same carriage and his daughter goes over and discovers that the woman, who turns out to be Margaret Krukowski, is in fact dead. Investigations show that she is a wonderful and caring woman, living in a lodging house in Harbour Street in fictional Mardle where she helps the owner Kate. But a sense of mystery around her past keeps knocking on the investigating team’s door… and when there is a second murder, Vera has to up her game.
This is a well thought out and easy to follow police procedural – No. 6 in the Vera Stanhope series – it deftly peels away the layers of the story and revisits clues (with a few red herrings along the way), without overworking the point.
This is a terrific novel to read if you are visiting the North East of England because it brings the area to life – observe the characters in the centre of town, Northumberland Street, past Fenwick Department Store (the original shop was founded in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1882, the second is in London, established in 1891), and journey down to the Sage, the Baltic and over to the amazing Lit and Phil – even New Look at the Metro Centre, Gateshead, gets a look in (no pun intended). And atmosphere is further created with a smattering of local jargon and characters that you can visualise on the streets of the area.
This review originally appeared on our blog
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