The Literate Kitty

Some of the biggest milestones in life are exciting and bittersweet at the same time.  Take high school graduations. The prospect of freedom is a siren’s call to soon-to-be grads... while the idea of leaving behind the known quantity of old friends and family may be both scary and sad. One thing that rarely crosses most new graduates’ minds, though, is their own deaths. Yet that’s the very tragedy at the beginning (and heart) of Ann Cleeves’ latest novel of suspense,  The Dying Light .   When Detective Matthew Venn gets called to a young woman named Lottie’s scene of death—a tragedy which occurred in a problematic location, to put it mildly—he’s rightfully on edge. The body was found in the swimming pool of a holiday home in the Devon countryside (not ideal)—owned by Paul Armstrong, a controversial politician on the rise. Paul and his family—wife and two young sons—found the body shortly after arriving at the mansion, where they planned to meet daughter Hannah and her sch...

When a fictional character is so familiar to you that they feel like an friend you’ve known forever, the author must be doing something (or, more likely, a   lot  of somethings) right. Vera Stanhope—the feisty, bull-headed, and frequently-irascible Northumberland Detective Inspector—is exactly that kind of comfortable-as-old-shoes character... and author Ann Cleeves is still doing her proud in the latest outing,   The Dark Wives .     After a young man is found dead in the wee hours one morning, Vera and her team are called to investigate. They quickly discover that the victim, Josh--found bludgeoned outside a home which houses troubled teens—was himself a worker at the home... and that one of the home’s few residents—a 14-year-old girl named Chloe—is now missing.    Nearly everyone immediately assumes the girl must’ve killed Josh—especially since the other staff members and teens all seem to agree that Chloe had been sweet on the college student—but V...