The Glass Room by Ann Cleeves.

               The Glass Room by Ann Cleeves.

"I never used to think like that. I never used to worry. Is that what violent death does to the people left behind? It makes us victims too, of our own anxiety."

D.I. Vera Stanhope is an excellent detective, meticulous and thorough in her investigations but so difficult as a boss. Ask some of the key players in her team: Joe Ashworth, her sergeant or Holly, even Charlie. With them she can be frosty and sarcastic with high and unreasonable expectations.  She finds relationships difficult and doesn't like people who make demands on her time. Vera admits to being more scared of people when they are alive than dead. She detested her late father Hector who seemed to despise Vera just as much as she despised him and informs us that she is haunted by him with mutterings in her head late at night. Her clothes are generally from Oxfam and her furniture is old. She knows she is overweight and lacks vanity in the way she talks about being the size and shape of a "barrage balloon." In fact she refers to living in squalor when she described her homelife. Her mother died of cancer when she was a child.

She is such a well-developed and interesting character, flawed yes but as a person not as a detective. When she was at her best she was at her "sharpest,  most outrageous and clever."  She thrived on solving murders and often went without sleep. Otherwise she binged on food and drink whilst visiting a crime scene, carrying out her investigations. Cleeves deliberately chooses not to stereotype Vera and this is her appeal.

It's October, we're in the north-east of England and Vera's hippy neighbour Jack, 40, one half of her eco-warrior neighbours has entered Vera's house waiting for her return. He has a problem and seems distressed because Joanna, his partner has disappeared leaving a note to say she needed a bit of space and has gone away for a few days. As a personal favour he asks Vera to investigate.

So this is where it all begins. Vera soon locates Joanna's whereabouts along the Northumbrian coast near Alnmouth and RAF Boulmer and just in sight of the Farne Islands. It seems that Joanna fancies her chances of being a published writer and has managed to get herself a bursary to attend the Writers' House run by a former successful writer called Miranda Barton and her son, Alex. Known as a retreat for budding writers, a number of residential courses were organised here. The current one was called Short Cuts. The art of the contemporary crime short story.

She snooped around the house thinking about how to approach this matter of seeking out Joanna, a house which had been set in an isolated location to add the Agatha Christie type suspense. Added to that, there were a number of mysterious guests who all had secret pasts some of which seemed disturbing. Vera was out of her comfort zone, noting the gloomy air about the place. She felt like a fish out of water, although she referred to herself as a "very fat Alice in a strange Wonderland." She was anxious in case she was mistaken for a madwoman or an inept burglar. It wouldn't do her street cred any good, would it? Or her reputation? She was fully aware of her failings: feeling ignorant and out of her depth with arty types or people who talked non-stop about books or pictures or films. She decided to knock on the front door with a story concocted that might sound plausible when she heard this blood-curdling scream: "It seemed hardly human and was without age or gender: loud and piercing and terrifying." A well-timed entrance and pushing her insecurities to one side, Vera was taken to the crime scene being praised for her swiftness in arriving at the murder scene!

The Glass Room was a favourite haunt of Professor Tony Ferdinand who worked at St Ursula's in London. A respected man with excellent contacts, he could help new writers to have their works published. He had appeared on The Culture Show and BBC4. This gave him considerable power and massaged his over-inflated ego. When Vera reached the room she found the professor sitting on the floor with an angry and outraged expression still visible on his face, his shirt covered in blood. He had been stabbed to death.

Miranda Barton, host, found him. The prime suspect was Joanna, Vera's neighbour who had been seen near the professor's room holding a knife. Had Joanna killed him or has she been set up? Discovering Joanna's psychiatric history, her bi-polar disorder as well as her assaults on her former husband, attacking him with a knife and her attempt to commit suicide suggests an unhinged person capable of murder. Equally unnerving is the discovery that Miranda had written this murder scene in her best-seller Cruel Women with chairs and tables and wine glasses in a particular place. Imagine the horror of discovering your piece of fiction becomes a reality.

Vera and her team interview all the writers who are suspects as well as Joanna and many of them had an intense dislike of the victim. Alex Barton tells his mother that he would dance on his grave! Nina Backworth disliked him too. We are told that he "picked on anyone vulnerable." He was a sexual predator, too brash and too full of himself. So it seems that Vera has her work cut out for proving Joanna's innocence and finding the real culprit.

"Writers were like parasites, preying on other people's stress and misery." Before the murder is solved, there is another gruesome throat slashing, a re-enactment of Nina Backworth's  crime story and Vera and her team have to find the connection between the murders and the possible motive before any further murders are committed.

"Deep down, everyone loved a murder. They loved the drama of it, the frisson of fear. people had been putting together stories of death and the motive for killing since the beginning of time to thrill and to entertain."

It's so cleverly written, faultless and an extremely satisfying read and I adore Vera Stanhope's rudeness and eccentricities.

Publisher: Pan Books. ISBN: 978-0-330-51270-1

REVIEW it by Carol Naylor.

Copyright 2015. Permission must be obtained from the author before any of this article review is reproduced.