Telling Tales - Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves has written five different crime fiction series since publishing her first George Palmer Jones novel in 1986, usually alternating novels between whichever are the two most current of her series. These days that means that Cleeves is alternating between additions to her nine-book Vera Stanhope series and additions to her latest series featuring Detective Matthew Venn - which is now two books long. Telling Tales (2005), the second Vera Stanhope novel, re-established that pattern for Cleeves. The novel was published a full six years after the first Vera Stanhope novel because the author published her only two standalone novels in between the first and second Stanhope books. The following year (2006), Cleeves introduced her Shetland series featuring Detective Jimmy Perez, and the Stanhope and Perez books together carried her to a whole new level of popularity she has enjoyed ever since. 

Telling Tales sees Vera and her young partner, Joe Ashworth, reinvestigating a ten-year-old murder conviction that has fallen apart. It turns out that the woman serving prison time for the murder is every bit as innocent as she has been proclaiming herself to be for the last ten years. A witness has finally come forward to prove that Jeanie Long was in London when the fifteen-year-old victim was strangled hours away in her rural village. Unfortunately for Jeanie Long, the news did not reach her in time to save her life. Now, much to the chagrin of the local police, Vera and Joe have been called in as unbiased outside investigators to figure out where and how everything about the initial investigation could have gone so wrong. 

And, even more importantly, to find the real killer who has escaped justice for the last decade.

Neither objective is going to be easy to achieve, however, because Vera soon learns that this is a village full of people hiding secrets about the past from each other — and now, from her. All Vera knows for sure is that none of them can be trusted or taken at face value, including the two cops who worked the murder case ten years earlier. Soon enough, Vera is not sure which she dislikes more, the village’s boringly flat landscape or the people who lie there. 

Bottom Line: Readers have come to expect complicated and satisfying mysteries from Ann Cleeves, and Telling Tales is no exception. I do suggest that, right from the beginning of the novel, readers begin making a list of character names and descriptions as each new character is introduced. There are many of them, and their relationships get more and more complicated as the story unfolds. I found myself referencing my own character notes almost to the end of the book, and without them, I think I would have missed out on some of Cleeves’s subtle hints and tricks — the very ones that make mysteries like Telling Tales so much fun.

Ann Cleeves