☰THE GLASS ROOM

DI Vera Stanhope is not one to make friends easily, but her hippy neighbours keep her well-supplied in homebrew and conversation, so she has more tolerance for them than most. When one of them goes missing she feels duty-bound to find out what happened. But her path leads her to more than a missing friend ...

It's an easy job to track the young woman down to the Writers' House, a country retreat where aspiring authors gather to workshop and work through their novels. It gets complicated when a body is discovered and Vera's neighbour is found with a knife in her hand. Calling in the team, Vera knows that she should hand the case over to someone else. She's too close to the main suspect. But the investigation is too tempting and she's never been one to follow the rules. Working with Sergeant Joe Ashworth, she starts the hunt for a murderer who is artistic as well as deadly.

There seems to be no motive. No meaning to the crime. Then another body is found, and Vera suspects that someone is playing games with her. Somewhere there is a killer who has taken murder off the page and is making it real...

"In The Glass Room Cleeves has pulled off the rare trick of writing about writers and writing without it being horribly self-referential and indulgent. And I do love Vera!"

Val McDermid

"Stepping into The Glass Room is a little like being transported back to the golden age of mystery stories: a windswept landscape, isolated country house, disparate people thrown together, crime scenes mimicking their fictional counterparts and a plot liberally strewn with blind alleys, red herrings and mis-directions. This book has all the elements of Agatha Christie at her best."

S.J. Bolton

"Cleeves crafts a subtle, complex mystery, and the curmudgeonly Vera and her distinctive view of the world make this series stand out in a crowded genre."

Publishers' Weekly

"...a masterful though not always likable detective who uses her uncanny knack for crime-solving to identify an unexpected killer."

Kirkus Reviews

"If you like the TV series, you're in for a treat - because the atmospheric but realistic books are even better."

Leicester Mercury

"Cleeves is very obviously having a little postmodern fun at the expense of her more pretentious peers... a solid and enjoyably old-fashioned police-procedural yarn"

Irish Times

"...an interesting novel studded with acute observations about crime writing."

Literary Review

"Ann Cleeves is always scrupulously fair in the construction of her plots; clues are seeded throughout the storyline and it's always possible to work out the likely killer - or it would be if we could only identify the clues and realise their significance! So it is with The Glass Room: once you know the answer, the clues are readily identifiable, but few readers will arrive at the correct solution more than a few pages before it it revealed."

Amazon.

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