Place Your Bets: The CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for Thrillers

Seeking a heart attack? Try Toronto's Edge Walk.

Are you a Type T personality, the sort of person who jumps at the chance to sky dive, run with the bulls in Pamplona or kayak over a waterfall higher than Niagara? Most people don't go that far for thrills, but many of us love movies that raise the pulse and books that require breathing through the mouth while reading.

My name is Fleming, Ian Fleming.

The British Crime Writers Association's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger is awarded to the best thriller novel, including translated works, first published in the UK during the judging period. (For this year's Dagger, it's June 1, 2013 to May 31, 2014.) Thrillers nominated by their UK publishers "can be set in any period and include, but are not limited to, spy fiction and/or action/adventure stories. Ian Fleming said there was one essential criterion for a good thriller: that 'one simply has to turn the pages.' This is one of the main characteristics that the judges will be looking for."

Recent past winners include Roger Hobbs's Ghostman, featuring a pro criminal who has 48 hours to fix a botched casino robbery; A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming, in which a disgraced spy searches for Britain's missing SIS chief-to-be (see review here); and Gillian Flynn's take on a deeply troubled journalist covering the murders of two preteen girls in Sharp Objects.

Those Dagger winners are very different. The shortlisted books are also dissimilar, creating a difficult task for the judges and a headache for anyone trying to predict the judges' decision. Let's take a quick look at last year's shortlist. How does one choose between a criminal fixer (the eventual winner, Hobbs's Ghostman); former Nazis in Ireland (Stuart Neville's Ratlines, reviewed here); Franco's secret police during the Spanish Civil War (The Sentinel by Mark Oldfield); and the enigmatic kidnapping of a Mumbai billionaire's daughter (Robert Wilson's Capital Punishment, reviewed here)? I didn't read The Sentinel but I enjoyed the others. My interpretation of the judges' choice is that originality, adrenaline and momentum were key. Unfortunately for my prediction of this year's winner, the judges aren't the same.

So, let's take a look at this year's shortlist. (All of the books on the list have been published in the United States. The US publisher is given after the UK publisher.)

Apple Tree Yard by Louise Doughty (Faber & Faber; Sarah Crichton Books)
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris (Random House; Knopf)
I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes (Bantam; Atria/Emily Bestler Books)
Natchez Burning by Greg Iles (HarperCollins; William Morrow)

The Oscars telecast features little clips of the nominated movies and Read Me Deadly follows that lead with thumbnail synopses of the Steel Dagger shortlist:

In Doughty's psychological suspense, Apple Tree Yard, eminent British geneticist Dr. Yvonne Carmichael is married to a fellow scientist and mother of two grown children. Her sexual liaison with a stranger (she calls him X) eventually leads to her appearance at the Old Bailey, charged with murder.

Harris's An Officer and a Spy is based on the real Dreyfus Affair in France at the end of the 19th century. Alfred Dreyfus has been sentenced to life imprisonment for treason when Col. Georges Picquart, head of France's counterespionage, investigates and comes to believe in his innocence.

Hayes's I Am Pilgrim features a race between a Middle Eastern terrorist's unfolding plot and an espionage/forensics specialist's attempt to identify and stop him.

The mayor of Natchez, Mississippi confronts a history of racial violence when his well-respected father faces murder charges in Iles's Natchez Burning, first book in a planned southern trilogy about family, honor and redemption.

Prediction: My Edgars predictions (here and here) were a piece of cake compared to forecasting the winner of this year's Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. As usual, I'll try not to divulge spoilers when I explain the thinking that leads to my pick.

Louise Doughty

In many ways, Doughty's Apple Tree Yard reminds me of one of the books that contended for this year's Edgar Award for Best Novel, Sandrine's Case, by Thomas H. Cook. Both novels begin in a courtroom, where a narrator of questionable reliability is on trial for murder. They, like the other main characters, are intelligent, accomplished people who are rather unlikable. The events that landed each in court are foretold by hints and divulged in a skillfully controlled way over the course of the book while the court case continues. The readers watch the piecing together of a jigsaw puzzle that's completed only near the end.

Apple Tree Yard, like Sandrine's Case, is very suspenseful. It is a chilling story about how we see ourselves and others and the devastating ways these perceptions can deceive us. I enjoyed the book and it definitely had me flipping the pages but it engaged my head more than my heart.

Robert Harris

On to the next candidate, Harris's historical fiction, An Officer and a Spy (reviewed here). It reads as an honest retelling of the infamous Dreyfus Affair and doesn't give in to melodrama. Rather than making Dreyfus his main character, Harris (author of the alternate-history novel Fatherland, in which Germany won World War II) gives that role to Colonel Picquart. It's an interesting choice. As the momentum of Picquart's investigation builds, we witness both Picquart's growth and change and the emerging proof of Dreyfus's innocence.

I agree with Sister Mary that this is a riveting read. Had it pulled in more historical background, I think it would have a better chance of claiming the Dagger.

Terry Hayes

Hayes' book, I Am Pilgrim (reviewed here), is a 624-page thriller. It's a rambling mishmash of police procedural, super-secret spy agency stuff, personal sagas and action adventure that begins with a crime scene in a seedy New York City hotel room, where we meet the forensics genius and loner known as Scott Murdoch, who later becomes Pilgrim. While the story backtracks to trace Scott's path to that hotel room, we also meet a young boy in Saudi Arabia who grows up to be a dangerous terrorist Pilgrim calls "the Saracen." It is Pilgrim's task to identify the Saracen, discover what plot he's planning and where it will hatch. This involves a far-flung and dangerous investigation that evokes painful memories for Pilgrim.

I had some problems with this book. I found the Saracen, although dastardly, in some ways more sympathetic than Pilgrim. He is certainly a more believable character. We are led to believe that Pilgrim is a brilliant forensics expert/spy, yet he makes some ludicrous mistakes necessary to advance the plot. These mistakes, and the number of convenient coincidences, stuck in my craw and affected my suspension of disbelief. That said, I still found the book entertaining and I bet it will make a blockbuster movie.

Greg Iles

Greg Iles has a long unsettling tale to tell about the history and consequences of racial hatred. Apparently 800 pages isn't enough, because his Natchez Burning is the first in a projected trilogy (The Bone Tree is due May 2015 and Unwritten Laws will arrive in May 2016).

I said earlier that Doughty's Apple Tree Yard reminds me of Cook's 2014 Edgar-nominated Sandrine's Case. Iles's book brings to mind a book nominated for that same Best Novel Edgar, William Kent Krueger's Ordinary Grace. Iles, like Krueger, is intimately familiar with his novel's setting, its people and their history. His book is also a powerful story about the need to right a wrong and how an adult's perception of an authority figure differs from that of his childhood. We know lawyer/writer/now-mayor Penn Cage from three excellent books and this is the best one yet. Ordinary Grace won the Edgar and I think Natchez Burning, a page-turning thriller and more, will win the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger.

Title Drawn Out of a Hat: Harris's An Officer and a Spy

I liked all of these books and I won't be surprised or disappointed if the judges' pick isn't the one I predict. Tell me, which do you think will be announced the winner on October 24th?

Little Free Library

Over at my Town Office, you can register your car, pay your property taxes, get a burn permit–––and borrow a book. In the corner there is a bookcase, and residents can take a book or leave a book. I've seen arrangements like this lots of places, but it's really taken off in recent years in a new form: the Little Free Library.

The movement started small, when Wisconsinite Todd Bol built a tiny wooden one-room schoolhouse to house a small collection of books, and set it on a post in his front yard so that neighbors could borrow books from it. Todd's idea was inspired by his mother, who was a teacher and book lover.

Todd made more of the little book houses for others, with no thought at the time of going further. But later on, he and community activist, Rick Brooks, decided that this concept could be used to build literacy and strengthen neighborhoods. The Little Free Library movement was born.

Today there are at least 10,000 Little Free Libraries around the world. If you go to the Little Free Library website here, you can buy a ready-made Little Free Library for your neighborhood in styles from an Amish Barn, to a Scandinavian Cottage to a British Phone Booth.

Or you could build your own Little Free Library for your neighborhood. The LFL website gives you some advice on how to go about making your Little Free Library successful. Register your Little Free Library on the website and it'll be added to the organization's world map of LFL sites.

If you built a Little Free Library for mystery lovers, what would it look like? Maybe a safe, if you're a fan of capers. A reproduction of Miss Marple's cottage? A jail cell? I'd say a locked room would be good, since who wouldn't want to be locked in a room of mystery books, but then I remember that the whole point of a locked-room mystery is for someone to be killed in it. OK, let's scratch that idea from our design for a Little Free [Mystery] Library!

No Mercy: A Review of Tiffany Baker's Mercy Snow

Mercy Snow by Tiffany Baker

The song "Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls," as sung by Hedy West, kept running through my head as I read Tiffany Baker's Mercy Snow. The author describes the bleak, gritty atmosphere of New England company towns so vividly that this mean town on the banks of the toxic Androscoggin River becomes a major character.

Titan Mills, New Hampshire, is named for the paper mill owned and run by several generations of McAllisters. June McAllister, wife of the current owner, is by default the social leader of the town, despite her private misgivings. Born a poor girl in Florida, she has struggled to live up to her husband's privileged position in the town. She and Cal have one son, Nate, now 17 years old.

Mercy Snow's life has been about as far from privileged as one can get. Her family owned a small farm outside of town on the Androscoggin, downstream from where the mill pumped its heavy load of poisons into the river. When her mother dies, she and brother Zeke and younger sister Hannah return in a rusty motor home in search of their father. Pruitt has died and the farmhouse fallen to ruin, but no one cares or questions. At just age 17, Mercy has already become the responsible adult, caring for Zeke and Hannah.

A few weeks after their return, the local school bus, full of children, is forced off the aptly-named Devil's Slide Road into a ravine by a car in a hurry. Young Suzie Flyte is killed. The bus driver is put into a coma, and several other children are severely injured. When Zeke Snow's old truck is found a few hundred yards ahead, smashed into a tree, no one looks further for the culprit. Rescuers pulling the children out of the ravine also discover what seem to be the remains of Gert Snow, the children's grandmother, who had vanished many years ago––run away, it had been presumed. As far as Titan Falls is concerned, the Snows have always been a scandal, outcasts, and general bad news.

Zeke, questioned by the sheriff, flees in panic after assuring Mercy of his innocence. He had been imprisoned once for trying to protect her from rapists, and can't bear the thought of going to prison again. A skilled woodsman, he can hide out in the woods for months. Mercy is determined to prove his innocence, but is thwarted everywhere by her skeptical neighbors and June McAllister, who has unhappily discovered her own reasons to want Zeke convicted and the case closed.

There is not a lot of mystery in this story; the who is pretty apparent early on. It is more of a brooding, gothic suspense tale with an unhealthy dose of class differences. In small towns turned in on themselves for generations, the residents can become as mean and narrow as the streets they inhabit. Both Mercy and June are trying desperately to protect their families, but their differing resources make the contest ludicrously uneven.

As the book closes, June is reading to a group of children in a library. She muses:

"The children knew only the panoramic and exaggerated villains of cartoons and video games…. But real badness wasn't like that. It masked itself in the faces of the people you loved, arrived in the form of accidents and misunderstandings, paraded through your life on quiet wheels before it exploded everything at once."

What disturbed me about this book was not the arrogance of privilege––that I expected. But the silent, mean-spirited complicity of the weak; the toadying sheriff and serpent-tongued townspeople, has haunted me. This, rather than the impossible small-town nightmares enumerated in so many gothic horror novels, troubled me and kept me reading. A remarkable book, beautifully written and depressing as hell. Read it anyway, and then examine your own conscience. I'm still working on mine.

Note: I received a free review copy of this book, published by Grand Central/Hachette Book Group, in January 2014.

Why Did the Human Cross the Road?

Recent reading has me contemplating human nature and destiny. Before we get to the actual books that inspired this thinking, we could warm up our minds by looking at Shakespeare for Cassius's ideas about being our own masters versus the fault in our stars or King Henry IV's desire to peek at the book of fate; however, it's Monday, and our heads are already spinning without the stimulus of the Bard. Let's ask instead why the chicken crossed the road. And no, we can't say it's simply to get to the other side.

I love the answers Harvard's David Morin attributes to physicists such as Einstein ("The chicken did not cross the road. The road passed beneath the chicken.") and Schrodinger ("The chicken doesn’t cross the road. Rather, it exists simultaneously on both sides . . . just don’t peek."), but those answers are observational. They don't really examine the nature of the chicken and the road or the roles played by the chicken's motivations and choices, as well as fate, in its crossing.

Sorry, Dr. Martin Luther King, but we're grilling these birds.

For those answers, we'll turn to philosophers. We'll skip Kierkegaard, who would no doubt attribute the chicken's crossing to a leap of faith, and Freud, who would likely blame your mother or your own underlying sexual insecurity for whatever interpretation of the chicken's behavior. I imagine Kant declaring, "The chicken, being an autonomous being, chose to cross the road of his own free will"; but Orwell disagreeing: "Because the government had fooled him into thinking that he was crossing the road of his own free will, when he was really only serving their interests." Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas point to a different inspiration: "The possibility of 'crossing' was encoded into the objects 'chicken'' and 'road,' and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence." Sartre, on the other hand, would observe that in order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Let's interpolate from the philosophers' ideas about a chicken's behavior in crossing the road to the behavior of the characters in books I've recently read.

If David Bowie can look like a Polish chicken,
Sal Cupertine can pass for Rabbi David Cohen.

In Tod Goldberg's Gangsterland (Counterpoint, September 9, 2014), we follow two characters who eventually meet up: One of them is Chicagoan Sal Cupertine, age 35, the younger cousin of a Mob-connected used-car king, Ronnie Cupertine. Sal is the doting father of little William and loving husband to Jennifer, who turns a blind eye to Sal's job as the Chicago Mob's best pro killer. The other character is Jeff Hopper, whose childhood dream was to wear a beautiful suit that concealed a gun, to catch bad guys, and to save America. When Jeff got older, he became more cynical, but he's still one of those guys you'd like to see coach your kid's Little League team. He is working for the FBI when he makes a mistake that leads Sal to kill three FBI agents and their confidential informant.

That sort of thing doesn't just slip unnoticed into the night. Jeff is placed on administrative leave. In the meantime, the Mob hustles Sal out of town for a series of plastic surgeries and quiet time for studying the Talmud (not difficult for Sal, who is known as "the Rain Man" for his memory), and then resurrects him as Rabbi David Cohen in Las Vegas. Las Vegas isn't what it used to be for organized crime, what with the corporatization of gambling and casinos, but there are still ways for connected guys to muscle in on the action in secondary markets, including construction, strip clubs, and drugs not handled by the Bloods and Crips. Believe it or not, there's even a place for a man like Sal at Temple Beth Israel, whose growing complex houses two rabbis, a mortuary, a cemetery, and a private school.

Tod Goldberg

What makes Gangsterland irresistible is its noirish look at the immutability of an individual's nature and the consequences of choices made long ago, as the sequelae of Sal's massacre ripple through the world of criminals, informants, and law enforcement. Writer Goldberg unspools his character-driven tale as if there's no other way it could happen. It's not surprising Sal becomes a killer in the first place: his dad was a gangster who died when he was thrown off a building, and Sal grew up committing crimes for his cousin. What were his options, and how were choices made by and for him? Sal doesn't get any pleasure from murdering people, but his bosses are always finding someone whom they think needs killing. Sal's life motto can be summed up with the words, "Everybody dies," and he knows it will be his turn one of these days.

Currently, he's stuck in Las Vegas, forbidden to call his wife and unable to look in the mirror without surprise, but he has plenty of time to think about who's pulling whose strings, how he got where he is now, and what the Talmud says about starting over. The Temple's members love Sal as David. Does this change him? Does the demonization of Jeff Hopper in the press and the lack of support from his former FBI superiors stop him on his quest to find Sal Cupertine? Everyone in Gangsterland does what he or she has gotta do, or at least what they think they gotta do. Sartre, anyone? They all gotta cross that road.

The Long Island Red symbolizes Achilles and his
lover, Briseis, both of whom have flame-colored hair.

It's a long road in time and space from 1990s Las Vegas to the Trojan War in the 12th century BC. It's also a leap from the noir of Goldberg's Gangsterland to the historical fiction/romance of Judith Starkston's Hand of Fire (Fireship Press, September 10, 2014), but both books tackle human nature, fate, and self-determination.

We can't discuss the humans of Greek mythology without mentioning the gods, who like to venture down from Olympus and meddle in mortals' lives. Favored mortals sometimes become pawns in the gods' Machiavellian games, although as famous Greek warrior and half-god Achilles says, "The gods and goddesses can do many things as suits them, but they cannot alter fate. Goddesses must bow before fate no matter how much it grieves them." Achilles doesn't have far to look for an example: his mother, the sea nymph Thetis, didn't succeed at burning away all his mortality when he was a baby. They are both aware of the prophecy that he will not return from the Trojan War.

As we know from Homer's Iliad, the Trojan War was prompted by Aphrodite's promise that Trojan prince Paris could have the world's most beautiful woman. Thus, Paris abducted––or eloped with––Queen Helen of Sparta. Her husband's brother, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, led forces gathered from around the Hellenic world to lay siege to Troy and get her back. While the Greeks are waiting, Agamemnon orders Achilles to pillage some nearby cities for treasure and women captives. While sacking Lyrnessos, Achilles meets Briseis, a beautiful young healing priestess and wife of Prince Mynes, when she tries to kill him. Of course, they fall in love.

Judith Starkston

While Hand of Fire may be too heavy on the romance for some readers, it is a carefully researched and beautifully written portrait of Briseis, one of the Iliad's minor characters, beginning with the death of her mother and her growth as a healing priestess to her life as a captive and Achilles' lover. It's been a while since I've read Ovid and Homer, but Starkston makes Briseis and Achilles and their world come alive. The ending invites a promised sequel, although classicist Starkston plans a novel about Queen Puduhepa of the Hittites as "sleuth" first.

Oh, and so why would Starkston's characters cross the road? For Achilles, I'll go with Emily Dickinson's reasoning for a chicken's crossing, "Because it could not stop for death." Through dying, Achilles achieves immortality in legends. As for the independent-minded Briseis, I think Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise has her number: "To boldly go where no chicken has gone before."

Note: If you love chickens, as I do, you might be interested in Stephen Green-Armytage's Extraordinary Chickens, a book of gorgeous photographs of unusual chicken breeds from around the world.

The Wolfe of West End Central: Review of The Murder Man by Tony Parsons

The Murder Man by Tony Parsons (Minotaur, October 7, 2014. International Edition published by Century, August 2014, under the title The Murder Bag)

The Murder Man is the first crime novel by well-known British journalist and author Tony Parsons. If you're familiar with his work, you'll see that some patterns are repeated, among them that the protagonist is the single father of a young child.

Detective Constable Max Wolfe lives across from London's Smithfield Market with his five-year-old daughter, Scout, and their new Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy, Stan. (Conventional wisdom is that the ideal dog name is two syllables, with a vowel ending, but I love the idea of a cute little sad-eyed, long-eared spaniel named Stan.) Father and daughter are close, Stan is learning about his new home, and all is well, except for the absence and sadness that can sometimes be heard softly echoing around their loft apartment's large spaces.

On the job, Max is a bit of a maverick. But not maverick as in the alcoholic, self-destructive, villain-whispering genius we see so often in today's crime fiction. Max is just a very good cop who sometimes lets his humanity and his inborn sense of duty make him a little bit deaf to orders and the rule book. Just enough of a maverick to have made it seem like a good idea to him to transfer out of anti-terrorism to homicide, to London's West End Central station on the famed Savile Row.

It looks like Max has landed in a good place, with congenial colleagues and a good mentor-type guv'nor, Detective Chief Inspector Malory. His first day on the new job is a shocker, as the team is called to the scene of a homicide in the high-rise office of a posh banking executive, where they find him dead from a brutal, but expertly-applied throat cutting.

Once similar killings reach the magic number of three, we have a serial killer, which not only changes the priority of the investigation, but sends the news outlets and the social media into an orgy of 24-hour coverage. The victims are sons of privilege, which is a wonderful hook for the news stories, websites and tweets, who characterize this as kill-the-rich class warfare and whip the public into an almost celebratory frenzy over the killer the cynical media are calling Bob the Butcher.

Because author Parsons begins the book with a short prologue from 1988––a scene of appalling sexual violence––we know the "whydunnit" of this mystery before the detectives do. This is a daring choice by Parsons, because it could make the reader feel the sleuths are slow on the uptake. But that doesn't happen here. Max and his team are smart and capable, quick on the scent.

Both Tony Parsons and Max Wolfe
like to relax with a spot of sparring

Also, Parsons is writing much more than a whodunnit here. This is very much a character-driven and issues-driven story. Max is human; tough, but also vulnerable, likable and funny, and even a reader like me, who dislikes reading too much about a detective's domestic situation, found Max's family life a plus to the story. Parsons interweaves the plot with issues of privilege, power, inequality and media manipulation. The story is also imbued with a powerful sense of place. Locations include Scotland Yard's Black Museum, its private museum of murder history, complete with weapons and relics going back to Jack the Ripper; the boxing gym Max frequents; Smithfield Market; a posh boys' school in the country.

Tony Parsons, back in his rock-and-roll journalism days.
Yes, that's The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, on the right.

I don't know if anyone else will agree with this, but this book reminded me a little bit of J. K. Rowling's Cormoran Strike series. The connection first came to mind because these are two novelists who are new to crime fiction, but it's more than that.

Both writers have developed very human protagonists who are out of the usual run of hard-drinking own-worst-enemy types. Both authors' crime fiction is character-driven, with a great sense of place, and incorporate commentary about modern society. I think most people who enjoyed Rowling's The Cuckoo's Calling and The Silkworm will be likely to enjoy the grittier The Murder Bag––assuming they can get through that prologue.

I'm thrilled to hear that Parsons plans two more books featuring Max Wolfe. I can guarantee they'll be on my pre-order list.

Notes: I listened to the audiobook of The Murder Bag, read by Colin Mace, who raised the level of the book even higher. After the short prologue, the book is told in first person by Max, and Colin Mace embodied that character perfectly.

Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Justice Disguised as a Bag Lady: Vera Stanhope

Who's that detective with the droopy raincoat of uncertain vintage? You know, the one with the slouch hat that saw Margaret Thatcher come into office? Is it Columbo? Or is it Wingfield's Jack Frost? Try again. That's right––it's Vera Stanhope! Ann Cleeves introduced her in The Crow Trap. I have been an avid fan ever since.

A crow trap is a large wire mesh cage with a funnel inserted into the top. Inside is placed a live tame crow that dances and flutters about, inviting any other crow to come in and defend its territory. Once in through the funnel there is no way out.

On a windy April day, three women meet for the first time at Baikie's Cottage in the North Pennines. This cottage had been owned by a naturalist and illustrator, Constance Baikie, who once walked through these hills in search of inspiration. In her will, she launched a charitable trust to encourage environmental education and research, and donated the cottage to that end. The three women visiting Baikie's Cottage are all scientists; Rachel is an expert in bird life, Annie is a botanist and Grace is a zoologist.

Their purpose for visiting the cottage is to do a survey for an environmental concern, prompted by a developer's desire to buy the land for a quarry. The land is next to a farm known as Black Law Farm. Rachel visits the farm and discovers the body of a friend of hers, Bella, with a suicide note. Rachel believes a look beyond the obvious is called for.

Before long, there is another death, a murder, and Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope enters the case. Vera is a native to this part of the country and she is unlike any police inspector these women have ever seen. As a matter of fact, she knew the original Constance Baikie and attended Bella's funeral. When she did so, the women all took her for a bag lady. Vera is large and dresses in loose-fitting clothing because she suffers from eczema. She is always barelegged and wears sandals in all weather because of her condition. No one would realize that she is very well regarded in the Northumbria police and heads her own murder squad.

She is obsessive about her work, and is driven by her own demons. Her associates accept her bad temper and cutting sarcasm because she is quite intuitive. Her trusted and long-suffering colleague is Detective Sergeant (DS) Joe Ashworth, her sometimes right-hand man and occasional surrogate son.

These women all have more in common than they realize. Life has treated none of them gently; more specifically, men in one way or another have betrayed them all. But they are all insightful and can see through facades more easily than others. Vera Stanhope is also very good at her job and, while she lacks for romance in her life, she usually gets her man––in the police sense of the word.

Vera theorizes that if the women stay at the cottage, the murderer will be drawn back and will be bait––like the crow in a trap. Is she doing the right thing? Rachel recognizes the ploy right away; after all, she is an expert on the avian psychology.

There are many currents swirling below the surface of this story. Some locals don't want the quarry.  The local landowners have dirty little secrets, as is always the case. Bella, the suicide victim, is not at all what she seemed, Annie had secrets, and Annie's husband had secrets, Grace had secrets and Rachel’s mother had secrets. It is an excellent start to a gripping series.

In the fifth series book, 2012's The Glass Room, Cleeves joins the ranks of those writers who turn the spotlight back in their own direction and write about writers and writing.

It all begins when a tired Inspector Vera Stanhope drives home, trying to appreciate what remains of a perfect October day. The views are one of the reasons she lives far from people of any kind, except for a couple who are living nearby in a back-to-the-land, sort-of-hippie fashion. She is astounded to find that Jack, one of these neighbors, has Goldilocked his way into her chair in front of her own fire and then proceeds to loudly wail that his wife is missing.

On her own time, Vera tracks her down to a retreat for writers of all sorts. It belonged to Miranda Barton, a once-successful author who now owns a large rambling house, in which Miranda puts on a number of residential courses for writers with different levels of experience. She calls her place The Writer's House, and she and her son Alex provide excellent experiences for small groups of writers. For any given event, there several well-known authors as tutors, and others in the business who can provide connections to publishers as well as a good word. The current course is directed to the wannabe crime writers.

Before Vera gets her foot through the door, she is recognized as police and she is escorted directly to a recently murdered guest, found knifed to death in a glass conservatory. By the time her partner, Joe, arrives Vera has had a good look around, also managing to find the errant wife, Joanna. The writers have locked Joanna in a room because she was seen coming out of the conservatory, knife in hand.

While Vera realizes that it would be appropriate to excuse herself from the case because of her acquaintance with the suspect, she has her own definition of appropriate. She has always plowed ahead and little gets in her way. Courage mixed with guile is stock in trade for Vera.

The victim was well-known critic and teacher, Tony Ferdinand. He was a man with such power in literary circles that a word from him could guarantee success in getting published and in getting read. If only he hadn't abused this power, he wouldn't be lying dead with few to mourn him.

The murder itself was unusual, not only in its setting but in the critical way it was staged. Vera sees the killer as creative and detail oriented, with a flair for the dramatic. It is clear to Vera that neighbor Joanna has been set up.

Cleeves has depicted a cast of very well drawn and interesting characters, and the story moves along at a rapid pace. Vera uses her murder squad for the details, but it is her insight into the workings of murderous minds that brings this story to life.

Cleeves has been writing clever mysteries, with birds as a backdrop, since the mid-1980s. She started with George Palmer-Jones, who was an amateur bird watcher in Surrey, England. I still have a few of those, although they are yellowed and dry. I also follow the Jimmy Perez Shetland Island series.

In 2011, British television launched the series Vera. For public viewing, they cleaned Vera up a little. I suppose the bag lady, homely, eczema-ridden Vera just wouldn't make it on TV. But her essential character translates very well to the screen, and series five has been promised for 2015.

The latest book in Cleeves's Vera Stanhope series, Harbour Street, was just released in Great Britain and I hope the US debut won't be far behind.