The Darkest Evening
A Chilling Mystery with Vera Stanhope, from the Sunday Times Bestseller
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4.5 • 15 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Christmas is coming – and death is at the door. DCI Vera Stanhope returns in The Darkest Evening, the ninth novel in number one Sunday Times bestseller Ann Cleeves’s phenomenally popular crime series.
The darkest nights can hide the deadliest secrets . . .
Driving home during a swirling blizzard, Vera Stanhope’s only thought is to get there quickly.
But with the snow driving down heavily, she becomes disorientated and loses her way, eventually stumbling on another car abandoned on the road. With the driver’s door open, Vera assumes the driver has sought shelter but is shocked to find a young toddler strapped in the back seat.
Afraid they will freeze, Vera takes the child and drives on, arriving at Brockburn, a run-down stately home she immediately recognizes as the house her father Hector grew up in.
Inside Brockburn a party is in full swing, with music and laughter to herald the coming Christmas. But outside in the snow, a young woman lies dead and Vera has a new case. Could she be the child’s mother and, if she is, what happened to her?
'A thoroughly engrossing thriller' – Mail on Sunday
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
CWA Diamond Dagger Award winner Cleeves's superb ninth novel featuring astute, irascible Det. Insp. Vera Stanhope (after 2017's The Seagull) finds Vera driving home late one night through rural Northumberland in a blizzard when she comes upon a car that's slewed off the road. The driver is gone, but Vera discovers a toddler strapped into a car seat. Soon after she transfers the child to her own car, she realizes that she's close to Brockburn, the once grand family home of the Stanhopes, and decides to go there. She last visited the place with her father when she was 15, and remembers that "the family had been unfailingly polite. That branch of the clan used politeness as a weapon of mass destruction." At Brockburn, the abandoned car's driver, a young woman, is found murdered behind the house. Vera assembles her loyal, if at times exasperated, homicide team to investigate, and comes to realize that the "whole case... was about families, about what held them together and what ripped them apart." This fair-play mystery brims with fully developed suspects and motives that are hidden in plain sight. Skillful misdirection masks the killer's identity. This page-turner is must reading for fans as well as newcomers.
