The Dark Wives... Vera Stanhope brings the spice to a perfectly anti-cozy fall mystery (Book Review)
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 Vera isn’t so sure. She insists (