Secrets in the Snow (The Darkest Evening mystery REVIEW)

The meandering, old roads of rural Northumberland, in the dark of a frigid winter’s night, with the season’s first blizzard raging away, as a cantankerous older woman grips the wheel of her ancient Land Rover, determined to make it home rather than giving in and finding a room somewhere.

But, as fate would have it, she misses her turnoff in the whiteout her truck’s headlamps fail to penetrate, and ends up creeping down an unfamiliar road… nearly running into another vehicle, that has partially slid off the slippery, narrow lane. Grumbling, the woman hauls herself out of the Rover and makes her way to other car, where she finds the driver’s door wide open, but no driver in sight. One passenger, however, remains: a toddler, strapped into a baby seat, all alone in the frigid cold and dark.

As put out as she might feel, though, the woman is nonetheless a Detective Inspector, and she isn’t about to let a child freeze to death… or its missing parent go unfound. 

So begins Ann Cleeves’ latest entry in the long-running Vera Stanhope series, The Darkest Evening.

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Things get a little more complicated once Vera takes the baby and drives to the nearest house… because the nearest house turns out to be a crumbling mansion that—decades ago—she knew rather well: Brockburn, the once-grand ancestral home where her father grew up, and to which he later—as the black sheep of the family—dragged his only daughter when he wanted to bum money off his elder brother. (Needless to say, there’s no love lost between the remaining Stanhopes at Brockburn—Vera’s haughty, now-widowed aunt and the put-upon daughter, Vera’s cousin—and prickly, plodding Vera, the poor relation.) With a pre-holiday fete underway, the dowdy detective and her little mystery guest are unwanted disruptions to the household, at best.

But that’s only the beginning, once the body of a young woman, brutally murdered, is discovered on the edge of Brockburn land, out in the drifting snow… putting a swift end to all festivities, and to peace in the small, nearby farming community for the foreseeable future. Because, as anyone familiar with Vera knows, once she gets her hooks into a case, she bulls her way through it until she has all of the answers she needs.

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Despite my own familiarity with Vera, from the self-titled TV show, The Darkest Evening was actually my first time encountering her in book form, and it was great fun. (So perfectly does actress Brenda Blethyn embody the character, that I heard her voice in my head every time book-Vera spoke, and pictured her squat, stocky presence tramping around in the village and the woods, throughout.)

Cleeves’ writing is clean and compelling; her descriptions colorful, her characterizations vivid, and her depiction of life in a rural area feels true. Throw in a complicated domestic situation (or three), a foreboding sense of history, and a multi-layered mystery, and you’ve got a nice little escape on your hands. 

Mystery fans—and anyone who appreciates a curmudgeonly, clever female detective as a delightfully-atypical protagonist—should definitely find The Darkest Evening a worthy diversion. :)
~GlamKitty 

[I received an advance copy of The Darkest Evening for review purposes; the book is set for release 8 September 2020.]