Carol Naylor's REVIEW it...

                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...

                                           More Lost Causes? It was probably around about July 1981. I can't call it life-changing as an experience but it did cause havoc and shaped my life as I know it now. Pear-shaped perhaps? Something definitely went seriously wrong. I kept thinking that someone out there didn't like me very much and it was pay back time. It's still painful thinking about it more than fifty years later. A teenager, home in Leeds. I arrived at York University a bit reluctant to sleeping in student accommodation and having to tolerate self-catering and mixing with lots of odds and sods. It wasn't my idea of heaven. I had to apply for leave of absence and it was so close to the end of term when my timetable was light and I didn't feel so under pressure. I had been studying with the O.U. since my ex thought it unwise to pursue my M,Ed at this time. I ...

            A Parrot in the Pepper Tree by Chris Stewart. "What should you wear in bed when you're waiting for someone to come and kill you? I decided on a tee-shirt and underpants as my battle costume." " A Parrot in the Pepper Tree" is another extremely entertaining and informative read , a fitting follow-up to "Driving Over Lemons." Lorca, renamed Porca , a Quaker Parakeet, not a parrot, makes his debut, besotted with Ana Stewart but wildly suspicious of Chris. We begin in Sweden with freezing temperatures of minus twenty-five degrees, six hours of non-stop late night driving, lashing ice and endless blackness. To keep himself awake and alive, Stewart resorted to practising his Mandarin Chinese which he had been trying to learn for years. Imagine being beset by a vivid image of death by freezing as he headed towards Norrskoy. He spent a month in these freezing conditions, shearing sheep to cover the costs of runnin...

                  Miss Carter's War by Sheila Hancock. "She could have had a lifetime of peace here with a man who loved her. When the hamlet gathered on Sundays to play bowles, her grandchildren could have joined those of their neighbours." Marguerite Carter was half-French. She worked behind enemy lines for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the second world war. Her mother was French, her father English and Marguerite had left France when she was 12. The Bletchley lot called them the Baker St. Irregulars. The story takes us through the 50s through to the millenium when Marguerite is a 24 year old teacher starting her first job at Dartford County Grammar, Hancock's old school. Marguerite, just like the writer, had a Messiah complex according to her close friend Tony Stansfield and Hancock's late husband John Thaw. She had a strong need to look after people being a busybody as she called herself. She hated idleness ...