Showing results by author "Ann Cleeves" in All Categories

The betrayal of those closest burns most of all.... Hoping for a fresh start, an English family moves to the remote Shetland islands, eager to give their autistic son a better life. But when a young nanny's body is found hanging in the barn beside their home, rumors of her affair with the husband spread like wildfire. As suspicion and resentment of the family blazes in the community, Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez is called in to investigate. He knows it will mean his boss, Willow Reeves, returning to run the investigation, and confronting their complex relationship.

On a hot summer on the Northumberland coast, Julie Armstrong arrives home from a night out to find her son murdered. Luke has been strangled, laid out in a bath of water and covered with wild flowers. This stylized murder scene has Inspector Vera Stanhope and her team intrigued. But now, Vera must work quickly to find this killer who is making art out of death. As local residents are forced to share their private lives, sinister secrets are slowly unearthed. And all the while the killer remains in their midst, waiting for an opportunity to prepare another beautiful, watery grave....

For fifty years a group of friends have been meeting regularly for reunions on Holy Island, celebrating the school trip where they met, and the friend that they lost to the rising causeway tide five years later. Now, when one of them is found hanged, Vera is called in. Learning that the dead man had recently been fired after misconduct allegations, Vera knows she must discover what the friends are hiding, and whether the events of many years before could have led to murder then, and now . . .

Who hung the headmaster in the playground on the night of the school Halloween Party? Almost everyone in Heppleburn either hated or feared the viper-tongued Harold Medburn. Inspector Ramsay is convinced it was the headmaster’s enigmatic wife but Jack Robson, school governor and caretaker, is determined to prove her innocence. With the help of his restless daughter Patty, Jack digs into the secrets of Heppleburn, and uncovers a cesspit of lies, adultery, blackmail and madness.

It was winter. Cold and clear, a different sort of day for this coast where the westerly winds usually blew rain and cloud. Detective Inspector Matthew Venn is standing by his kitchen window when he first spots them. Two young girls, facing away from him, seemingly staring towards something in the distance. They are holding hands, and they are alone.

The man’s body is found in the early morning light by a local dog walker on the common outside Rosebank, a care home for trouble teens. The victim is Josh, a staff member, who was due to work the previous night but never showed up. DI Vera Stanhope is called out to investigate the death. Her only clue is the disappearance of one of the home’s residents, fourteen-year-old Chloe Spence. Vera can’t bring herself to believe that a teenager is responsible for the murder, but even she can’t dismiss the possibility. Vera, Joe and new team member Rosie Bell are soon embroiled in the case.

Life seems perfect in Valley Farm, a quiet community in Northumberland. Then a shocking discovery shatters the silence. The owners of a big country house have employed a house-sitter, a young ecologist named Patrick, to look after the place while they’re away. But Patrick is found dead by the side of the lane into the valley - a beautiful, lonely place to die.

In the dark days of a Shetland winter, torrential rain triggers a landslide that crosses the main road and sweeps down to the sea. At the burial of his old friend Magnus Tait, Jimmy Perez watches the flood of mud and water smash through a house in its path. Everyone thinks the home is uninhabited, but in the wreckage he finds the body of a dark-haired woman wearing a red silk dress. Perez soon becomes obsessed with tracing her identity and realizes he must find out who she was and how she died.

When young teacher Anna Blackwell is found dead in her home, the police think her death was suicide or a tragic accident. After all, Stonebridge is a quiet country village in the Scottish Borders, where murders just don't happen. But Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez soon arrives from faraway Shetland when his ex-wife, Sarah, asks him to look into the case. The local gossips are saying that her new husband, Tom, was having an affair with Anna. Could Tom have been involved with her death?

Old college friends Rob, Oliver and Mick reunite on a bird-watching tour to America. It is the first time in 20 years the three have been together—since the fateful holiday to America during which they met the enigmatic Laurie.... The tour party is hoping for spectacular sights at High Island on the Upper Texas coast, but as the rain pours down and the birds descend, Mick is discovered dead. Back in Britain, PIs George and Molly Palmer-Jones are working on a minor fraud case with name of Brownscombe Associates attached.

On the first snowy night of winter, Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope sets off for her home in the hills. Though the road is familiar, she misses a turning and soon becomes lost and disorientated. A car has skidded off the narrow road in front of her, its door left open, and she stops to help. There is no driver to be seen, so Vera assumes that the owner has gone to find help. But a cry calls her back: a toddler is strapped in the back seat.

As the snow falls thickly on Newcastle, the shouts and laughter of Christmas revelers break the muffled silence. Detective Joe Ashworth and his daughter Jessie are swept along in the jostling crowd onto the Metro. But when the train is stopped due to the bad weather, and the other passengers fade into the swirling snow, Jessie notices that one lady hasn't left the train: Margaret Krukowski has been fatally stabbed. Arriving at the scene, DI Vera Stanhope is relieved to have an excuse to escape the holiday festivities.

A visit to her local prison brings DI Vera Stanhope face to face with an old enemy: former detective superintendent, and now inmate, John Brace. Brace was convicted of corruption and involvement in the death of a gamekeeper—and Vera played a key part in his downfall. Now, Brace promises Vera information about the disappearance of Robbie Marshall, a notorious wheeler-dealer who disappeared in the mid-nineties, if she will look out for his daughter and grandchildren. He tells her that Marshall is dead, and that his body is buried close to St Mary’s Island in Whitley Bay.

James was in high spirits because he’d finally completed his long awaited autobiography. He didn’t leave a suicide note. But even more suspiciously the record of his life’s environmental achievement, his magnum opus, has gone missing. Troubled, Meg calls in amateur sleuths George and Molly Palmer-Jones to investigate. They soon uncover that life in the Morrissey family is not as idyllic as it seems—relations with ex-wife Cathy are not as friendly as Meg makes out and James appears to have fallen for another women.

Shetland Detective Jimmy Perez knows it will be a difficult homecoming when he returns to Fair Isle. It’s a community where strangers, while welcomed, are still viewed with a degree of mistrust. With the autumn storms raging, the island feels cut off from the rest of the world. Tempers among the trapped islanders become frayed. Enough to drive someone to murder? When a body is discovered, the islanders react with fear. With no support from the mainland, Jimmy has to investigate the old-fashioned way.

When an elderly woman is shot in what appears to be a tragic accident, Shetland detective Jimmy Perez is called to investigate the mystery. The sparse landscape and the emptiness of the sea have bred a fierce and secretive people. As Jimmy looks to the islanders for answers, he finds instead two feuding families whose envy, greed and bitterness have lasted generations. Then there's another murder and, as the spring weather shrouds the island in claustrophobic mists, Jimmy must dig up old secrets to stop a new killer from striking again....

A rare and unrecorded sea bird captures all the birders attention whilst right under their noses the most fanatical birder of them all disappears. Later, Greg Franks’s corpse, the head bludgeoned, is found floating in the sea. Had it not been for Greg Franks, amateur detective George Palmer-Jones would not have been on the bird watching trip in Cornwall to the first place. He had been hired by Greg Franks’s anxious parents to try and persuade their errant son to return home.

As the snow falls in Newcastle, Detective Joe Ashworth and his daughter, Jessie, travel home on the busy Metro. When the train stops unexpectedly due to bad weather, Jessie notices that one woman doesn’t leave, and when trying to wake her they find that the passenger has been fatally stabbed. With no witnesses DI Vera Stanhope looks into the victim’s past and discovers she lived for years on Harbour Street, in a run-down Northumberland fishing town.

When DI Vera Stanhope finds the body of a woman in the sauna room of her local gym, she wonders briefly if, for once in her life, she’s uncovered a simple death from natural causes. Then Vera spots ligature marks around the victim’s throat...Vera revels being back in charge of an investigation again, working with Sergeant Joe Ashworth to find a motive. While Joe struggles to reconcile his home life with the demands of the case, death has never made Vera feel so alive. The duo investigates the victim’s past and discovers a shocking case, involving a young child.

Ursula Ottway’s beautiful cottage is wanted by her landlord, politician Marcus Grenville, so he can convert it into a holiday residence. So when Ursula discovers that the illegal use of poisoned bait on Grenville’s land has killed not only a rare bird of prey but her two beloved cats, she storms to his house and threatens revenge. Shocked and saddened to find Ursula’s body the morning after this conflict, Molly and her husband, George, decide to piece together a picture of Ursula’s last days.