Certain places have a beauty and charm whose scenery can become extremely sinister in the hands of a good editor. That is the case in Northtumberland and Ann Cleeves. Because this northern English area, bordering Scotland and watered by the North Sea offers landscapes of true luxury for any spectator or for a landscape painter. Endless meadows with the naked eye, castles that emerge imposing between the plain and the sound of the waves that calmly die on the coast worn by millenary erosion.
Natural wealth and overwhelming silence, suggestions for a good retreat, but also an invitation to introspection, to dive into the recesses of the soul and of the drives that, in the case of human evil, is shocking.
So amid so much beauty, the discovery of a child killed by his own mother ends up giving us that raw slap. The small body lies in the bathtub, in a delirious composition of death and flowers.
Inspector Vera Stanhope handles the case and meddles in the coastal life of the locals. Lives that pass rocked in the mimetic tranquility of that space open to eternity. And this is how we delve into the future of the fate of Julie Armstrong, the dead boy's mother, or the chores of Peter Calvert, in whose house the next victim appears, a young woman sentenced to death in a similar presentation to that of the child.
Many other characters such as Samuel Parr or Clive Stringer arouse contradictory feelings, with that magical intention of presenting signs and suspicions in the reader, in the style of a Agatha Christie more up-to-date inspiration towards the black detective genre.
The inquiries and probes of Vera and her assistant Joe compose a strange map of souls, a script where the emotion or the last instinct that may have led to murderous madness slides like a strange premonition that augurs more victims.
You can now buy the novel A Hidden Truth, the book by Ann Cleeves, with a discount for accesses from this blog, here: