Harbour Street - Ann Cleeves

 

(Not the cover on copy I read, but I much prefer this one.)

Harbour Street is book number six in Ann Cleeves's Vera Stanhope series, and it's a good one. Cleeves sometimes has a tendency to keep her main character behind the curtain until she's fully set up all the side characters and the mystery to be solved (even to approaching the 75-100 page-mark sometimes) but that's not the case with Harbour Street.

The first sentence of the novel is "Joe pushed through the crowd." As in Joe Ashworth, Vera's favorite detective, and Vera herself shows up on page 13 this way:

"Outside there was an enormous woman. She wore a shapeless anorak over a tweeded skirt. A wide face and small brown eyes. Her hair was covered by the anorak hood. On her feet, wellingtons. Her hair and her body were covered in snow...The abominable snow-woman..."

That rather comedic introduction of Vera is so dead-on that series fan will recognize the lonely detective long before Vera opens her mouth to introduce herself. And for me, this series is all about Vera and her evolving relationship with Joe, so this all made for a promising beginning to Harbour Street.

It's the Chrismas season, and Joe and his daughter are in Newcastle doing some relatively last-minute shopping when they notice that one of their fellow passengers has not gotten off the train with everyone else. For good reason. As it turns out, she's been stabbed to death.

Vera feels a little guilty about being so excited to have something interesting to take her mind off the season and her separateness, but soon she and Joe are trying to find out why anyone would have wanted to kill what seems to have been such a well thought of elderly woman like Margaret. Things begin to get complicated when a second woman is found dead in the little Harbour Street community because Vera is convinced from the beginning that the two murders have to be connected. She is not one to believe in coincidences like two murders happening so close together by sheer chance in a neighborhood as small as this one. And, of course, she's right about that.

So she and her crew start digging. And what they discover is going to take some real effort on everyone's part if any of them are going to be home on Christmas day. 

Harbour Street is intertwined with multiple suspects who come and go, and come again, as the investigation unfolds. Longtime fans of the series will already know this, but let me emphasize it for those who may be reading Ann Cleeves for the first time: keep a notepad handy. Jot down the names of side characters and how they relate to one another. Pay particular attention to flashbacks and how they seem to relate to the present day. If you do those things, you will fully appreciate just how intricately plotted an Ann Cleeves mystery always is. And although I've never managed to do it, you will have a good/fair shot at figuring out who the culprit is even before Vera figures it out for herself.

As usual, I enjoyed visiting Vera Stanhope and Joe Ashworth again, and look forward now to reading the few Vera Stanhope books I'm still holding in reserve.