She’s called in to investigate a suspected suicide, but as always, her instincts prove to be spot on, and she’s soon looking for a murderer. For the National Year of Reading, Ann was made reader-in-residence for three library authorities. It came as a revelation that it was possible to get paid for talking to readers about books! She went on to set up reading groups in prisons as part of the Inside Books project, became Cheltenham Literature Festival's first reader-in-residence and still enjoys working with libraries. A group of elderly (=my age!) people gather every five years in a reunion of a bonding weekend they'd attended while in high school (not, of course, called that--this is in Northumbria). They are in a beautiful but isolated place which becomes an island when (you guessed it!) the tide rises. Then no one can get on or off the island, at least by car which is how these folk arrived.

Ann's contribution to The Starlings and Other Stories (which she has also edited), is the title story, The Starlings, featuring DI Vera Stanhope. For this collection of twelve short stories, Ann invited each of her fellow members of Murder Squad writers' group to join her, with an accomplice, in writing a short story inspired by the dramatic photography of Pembrokeshire-based author David Wilson. The Starlings and Other Stories is published by Graffeg. Ann has previously used short stories as an opportunity to explore Vera's past: The Habit of Silence, one of Ann's contributions to Best Eaten Cold, the second anthology of stories from Ann and her colleagues in the Murder Squad, reveals something more about Vera Stanhope, the woman she is now and the past that made her. The Woman on the Island, now available as a Kindle single, was originally published as Hector's Other Woman in Guilty Consciences, the new anthology from the prestigious Crime Writers' Association, and is now reissued in Ann's short story collection, Offshore.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. The writing was great, typical Cleeves. You go down one path and find out you are dead wrong. The flow was a bit up and down (but not enough for me to drop a star). All eleven previous series of TV's crime drama VERA are now available to fans in both the UK and the US. They have been widely broadcast; VERA was nominated for an Edgar Award, for Dark Road, the first episode of series 6 (an original screenplay by Martha Hillier). VERA was ranked sixth best TV series of all time in a recent poll. In February 2019 it won the Judges' Award at the Royal Television Society NE Awards in Gateshead. If there is a criticism, it is that there is considerable repetition and too much time spent on the professional competition between Joe and Holly—“She didn’t dislike Joe, but she saw him as competition.” Vera knows exactly how to lead her team to get the best out of each of them, and Cleeves doesn’t do things without having a purpose. Learning the reason for the focus is a game changer.

THE RISING TIDE is a murder mystery with enough suspect twists to have your head spinning. The story is told from multiple viewpoints, adding to the drama. The suspense in this complex, extremely well-written mystery is as mesmerizing as the landscape.”— Free-Lance Star The judging panel consisted of Geoff Bradley (non-voting Chair), Lyn Brown MP (a committee member on the London Libraries service), Frances Gray (an academic who writes about and teaches courses on modern crime fiction), Heather O'Donoghue (academic, linguist, crime fiction reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, and keen reader of all crime fiction) and Barry Forshaw (reviewer and editor of Crime Time magazine). The Rising Tide is the tenth book in the Vera Stanhope series by Ann Cleeves. It was the first book by Anne Cleeves I have read. Reading it as a stand-alone did not inhibit my enjoyment.School friends first bonded fifty years earlier at a retreat on Holy Island. They were led by a young teacher. They have had a reunion every five years since. On their first reunion, one of the participants, Isobel Hall, died when caught in the rising tide while crossing the causeway. Now, the five who have returned regularly at five-year intervals plan to spend their time with good food and drinks while they reminisce, remembering their youth and good times. The memory of Isobel's death haunts them still. It has been fifty years since they first met, but how well do they know each other? Have they been involved over the years? Who doesn’t love “large and shabby” Vera Stanhope, the blunt detective in Ann Cleeves’s Northumberland police procedurals? She is already one of the genre immortals."— The New York Times My favorite part of the book is the location. Interestingly, the accesibility of Holy Island is totally dependent by the tides. The causeway to the island is totally inaccessible two times per day whenever the tide is high. This timing plays a big role in the story. In this, the tenth in Anne Cleeve’s excellent series, Vera find’s herself on the lovely but isolated island of Lindisfarne…..also known as Holy Island, a small community only reached by a causeway, completely cut off from mainland Northumberland at high tide.