Sunday, August 18, 2024

The Dark Wives by Ann Cleeves

In this eleventh book in the Vera Stanhope series, Ann Cleeves again populates the story with great characters in believable situations set in a complex plot that kept me turning pages.

New employee Josh Woodburn's body is found outside of a home for hard-to-place teens, and one of the charges, fourteen-year-old Chloe Spence, is missing. Vera and her team, including new member Rosie Bell, have been called to investigate. Their first question: did Chloe run away because she is the killer or because she is in fear of her life as well? As the team delves into the murder, the motive is as elusive as Chloe's whereabouts. When another body is found in a remote village near three standing stones known as the Three Dark Wives, Vera connects the dots to both Chloe and the group home and steps up her efforts to find the killer.

This series is my favorite of the three mystery series Cleeves has penned. I enjoyed the Shetland Island series, and her Two Rivers series gets better and better, but Vera is such a unique character that she's hard to beat. How Cleeves comes up with such intriguing plots is impressive to me. This book can be read as a standalone, but why deprive yourself of the ten other Vera novels? 

4.5/5 stars.

Thank you, NetGalley and Minotaur Books, for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own. The publication date is August 27, 2024.  

For more information:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble

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