Once again Ann Cleeves turns out a great tale. Once you open the book you can't put it down. Lots of great descriptives of locales as well as interesting characters & lots of moody atmosphere. She never disappoints.

Wow! What a great installment in the Vera series. This one really kept me engaged, and I didn't see the ending coming at all. I am happy to see that #11 is due to be released in 2024, because the ending of this one left me hanging.

I love all of the Vera books! They certainly don't make for a fast read, but Vera and her fellow officers are so well written - their personalities shine through so much that you end up feeling as if they are your colleagues and family. Cleeves also captures the location making it a character of its own. The isolation and cold creeps in as you read.
This time, there's a group of old school friends with a big secret from years ago and they are now being picked off. It's very Agatha Christie-ish in all of the best possible ways. The mystery is twisty and turning and quite fun (in a murderous sort of way). Recommended!

⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press, Minotaur Books for the arc! Another great mystery by Anne Cleeves. The author did a great job pulling the reader into the story. Will recommend!

Thank you to the author, St. Martins Press and NetGalley for this ARC.

I loved reading this. It's not the first of your staying home books. But I was able to catch on. I watched a series so I didn't feel like I was out of the loop. I think author is an excellent writer. And so many people are just drawn to Vera stay and help in her character. It's funny she's an older lady wearing a floppy hat and a trench coat solving crimes. I love it. Definitely recommend. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

4.5 stars. Possibly the best of all the Vera Stanhope books. Back in the 80s a group of high school students go on a weekend trip organized by their teacher to Lindisfarne. A weekend of meditation and bonding, drinking and horseplay. They decide to have a reunion every five years, but the first reunion is marred by an unexpected death. And now, 45 years later, as the group meets for their reunion, death again makes an unexpected appearance.

Ann Cleeves never disappoints. I have read most of the books in the three series, Vera Stanhope, Sheltand, and the newer Matthew Venn books. It would be hard to say which is my favorite. I have been an avid mystery fan ever since my 8th grade teacher introduced me to Agatha Christie many moons ago. I prefer cozies to thrillers and don't read books with serial killers. By Cozy I really mean I like the murderer to have a reason for committing a crime not just have it be some random act of violence. Mysteries are more fun when you can try and figure out who did it and why. In that regard, a good mystery writer always provides ample clues and lets you try and figure it out without making anything obvious or springing an unknown fact in the last few pages. On that I will cry foul!
The best part about Cleeves books is the character development. She provides rich backgrounds and luscious landscapes for the reader to get lost in.
In The Rising Tides, each character has a complicated history laid out bit by bit until you realize all is not what it seems. A group of "friends" have been getting together yearly after becoming close on a school excursion several years before. There is a lot of personal baggage here that Vera and her team expertly uncover. How well do these friends really know each other? The landscape becomes a character here. Is the island a metaphor for the isolation the characters have drawn around themselves over the years? There are not any really unlikeable characters in most of Cleeves novels and Vera always seems to regret having to arrest the culprit I always have the feeling she has such empathy for the bad guy.

I absolutely loved this book. It hooked me and kept me turning pages until I was done. Finished it in two days! The character development was strong, and the premise was unique enough that it didn't feel like anything else I've read.

I love Vera, so I know before I even start to read I'm going to be giving it a 5 star rating. One of the best characters ever portrayed on TV, Cleeves writing has slowly evolved to make the written Vera more like the TV Vera and I love that. Great plot as always too!

Loved this! I just love this series and Ann Cleeves in general. This was a solid detective novel set in the moody, coastal northern UK. Great team and side characters. I didn’t know who had done it till the the end! Kept me guessing.

DI Vera Stanhope at her best. I have not read the entire series, and those I have read have not been in order; I have not been confused by this.

This addition to the series focuses on a group of friends who first went on a retreat to Holy Island fifty years previous, led by a very young teacher. The group has returned to the island every five years since. They spend their time catching up and reminiscing. At the first reunion, Isobel Hall, dies after getting caught in the tide as she tried to cross the causeway. Now, 50 years later, Rick, a celebrity journalist is recently let go from his job following a complaint of sexual assault. He is writing a mystery novel. Philip, Anglican vicar, Annie runs a bakery, Ken has dementia and is cared for by his wife, Louise. The next morning Rick is found dead, thought to be a suicide. Is it really a suicide? How have the group members been involved over the years? And are they telling the truth?

DI Vera is called to attend the suicide and she immediately decides it is murder. The story goes from there. There are many more characters involved - Annie's ex-husband Daniel, Rick's ex-wife Charlotte, Judith Marshall the young teacher.

Vera puts her crew to work, Joe Ashworth who she views as the son she never had; Holly, the up and coming investigator; Charlie who seems to have ways to uncover evidence unseen by others.

The island itself becomes part of the scene. Twice each day, the tide blocks the causeway, causing people to have to remain on the island, and preventing those wanting to come to the island. Then a second murder occurs, almost identical to the first. Vera believes these are connected by the events of fifty years ago, and she tenaciously digs out the facts. Everyone is a suspect and no one is let off the hook.

A good mystery writer never gives away whodunit until the end, and Ann Cleeves pulls this one off in an amazing fashion.

This addition to the Vera Stanhope series was fascinating. The atmospheric setting was chilling and was a great backdrop for Vera’s latest investigation.
Many thanks to St. Martin’s Press and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

Another excellent Vera Stanhope mystery. The setting is Holy Island, unreachable twice a day due to tides, so it makes for a partially locked room mystery. An unlikeable character is found dead when old school friends visit for their reunion. It's hard to think of these older folks as potential murder suspects, but someone on the island had to be the one that did it, right? How else could they avoid the rising ride? I could not put it down and was surprised at the end. Recommend for Agatha Christie mystery lovers.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the gifted copy.

Ann Cleeves is an accomplished mystery writer, and in The Rising Tide, we get another installment from her detective Vera Stanhope.

A sign of clever plot and character development is that the characters in question are the focus for the first ten percent or so of the novel; only after the death occurs does Vera Stanhope and her team appear. It's a diverse cast of school chums who meet up regularly, seemingly remaining friends although their lives are so disparate and they've gone separate paths, some finding fame and wealth, others living their simple, ordinary lives. Stanhope and her team delve into their pasts, learning the complex relationships and the pivotal moments that bonded them together, questioning whether a previous death decades earlier at the same site has any significance to the current day murder.

Cleeves is adept at striking a balance, ensuring all characters have nuance and flaws. No one is spared, and that allows characters to feel believable and genuine.

(I received a digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.)

I really do love the Vera books and Vera Stanhope, the main character. In this book, she is more manipulative than even her usual self, playing Holly and Joe off of each other and only occasionally feeling sorry for doing so. She seems to be sensing a change coming on and is reflective about how her past has influenced her present. The book ends with a bang, and it will be interesting to see how that affects her in future books.

Vera and her crew investigate a death on an island that is cut off from the mainland by tides flooding the causeway connecting the two landmasses. Her investigation ties together events from decades ago when a group of teenagers met and bonded on the island and a reunion of that group, now elderly, in the present. As always in Cleeves' books, the characterization is strong, the setting is beautifully rendered, and the plotting is both complicated and intense. Combined with Vera's ruminations, this makes for a very strong book in the series.

In this 10th in the series, Vera and her team investigate murder on Holy Island - the suspects, an elderly group of friends who had been meeting there for 50 years!

This episode in the ever popular series starts as a slow and steady police procedural, but crescendos in edge-of-the-chair tension and action that leaves Vera desolate.

The Rising Tide will strike a chord of recognition with lovers of The Big Chill. Our deepest hopes, ambitions, and fears of failure are well known to the friends of our youth. They know where the bodies are buried, who feels guilt, who was betrayed, and who’s sitting on “long-held secrets.” The friends in The Rising Tide went to Holy Island for a school trip fifty years ago. On their first reunion, five years later, one of their group drowned, “lost to the rising causeway.” The group scattered over the decades, some pursuing careers in London, others staying local. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote centuries earlier that Time and tide wait for no man, an apt metaphor: life has treated them all differently. Ken has Alzheimer’s. He’s sixty-six, the same age as Annie, the glue of the group. Annie reflects on the passage of time.

Her first response was shock that they’d aged so much in the past five years. Perhaps it was Ken, sitting with Lou, attentive at his side, and Skip his dog at his feet, that prompted the thought. Ken looked misty-eyed, seemingly struggling to appear aware of what was going on, and horribly frail.

The #MeToo era fells Rick Kelsall, once a popular television personality and the charismatic star of the group. Annie takes on the guilt of his fall from grace, beating herself up for allowing him to snog her too forcefully: “Not that he’d raped her, nothing like that, but he’d come pretty close. Made her uncomfortable.” Could she have changed things if she had stopped him cold, been more confident when she shut him down?

Then he would have got the message earlier that he couldn’t behave like that. He wouldn’t have tried it on with his young colleagues. He might still have his show on the BBC.

Lou asks Rick if he really got it on with the teacher who arranged their first group gathering. Ordinarily, boasting about the past would be Rick’s preference but he remembers that even old friends might gossip about him to the press.

‘Honestly, Lou?’ Rick smiled. ‘I really can’t remember.’ A pause. ‘You’ll have to read all about it when my book comes out. It’s fiction naturally, but very definitely based on fact. You’ll find our pasts very much brought back to life. All our secrets, actually, finally seeing the light of day.’



Of course, they all demanded more details. He could tell they were intrigued. Some of them were a little anxious, which they deserved to be. Just you wait, he thought. Just you wait.

A tell-all book sounds ominous but per usual, they chat and eat, drinking heavily all the while before retiring. They’re leaving middle age behind. Does illness and age hide one’s true self or reveal it? Rick ponders that as he thinks about Ken’s deterioration, noting that “hidden anxieties were emerging and Rick wondered if they’d always been there.” Rick makes his way to his solo room and dons a dressing gown because pajamas were never his style. “From his bed, he could see the black, starless shape of the hill and the light-spangled sky behind it.” The phone rings. Is it an emergency? Rick’s drunk, slurring his words, and he’s not sure if he recognizes the voice. It’s a lot to take in.

He switched off his phone and shook his head to clear the memory of the bitterness at the other end of the line. Some mad person. Since the allegations had been made, he’d had a few of those calls. They weren’t worth bothering with. It was the price of fame. Soon, the bastards would realize he was more of a victim than his accusers.

“Soon” never comes. When he doesn’t show up for breakfast, Annie goes to his room. “Rick was hanging from a white plaited cord from the beam that crossed the vaulted ceiling.” His body is wizen and shrunken, dramatically different from the vibrancy he exuded in life. Annie comes to the obvious conclusion: Rick committed suicide.

Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope and her team are called in because it’s a high-profile case. Everyone is eager to pronounce Rick’s death a suicide but Vera’s not so sure. Detective Constable Holly Lawson is tasked with questioning the coroner, which makes her thoroughly uncomfortable. “Holly’s respectable parents were believers, evangelicals, members of their local church, and a doctor came a very close second to the Lord in their hierarchy of reverence.” She apologizes for her seeming impertinence.

‘Not impertinent at all. I would never say this to her face, of course, but the inspector is a very intelligent woman. She’s very often right.’



‘She asks if the hyoid bone is broken?’



‘Do you know what the hyoid bone is?’ Keating sounded genuinely curious, but Holly felt as if this was some sort of test. She wondered if Joe would be this nervous.



‘Isn’t it the bone at the front of the throat?’



‘Exactly. Shaped like a butterfly. Inspector Stanhope’s question is apposite. It usually is broken during hanging and strangulation. But not always. No, that is by no means inevitable.’



‘And in this case?’



‘In this case, it’s not broken.’ He frowned.

The coroner, even with an intact hyoid bone, is not prepared to walk away from a suicide verdict. But Holly’s next directive, for him to “take a swab of the nose,’ seals the deal. He takes a swab and shows it to Holly, asking her what she sees: ‘It’s yellow,’ she said. ‘Are they yellow fibres?’ Yes indeed. The coroner outlines the manner of Rick Kelsall’s death.

‘This tells us, I think, that Mr Kelsall was smothered. The cushion was placed over his face, and held tightly, so when he struggled for breath, some of the loosely woven yellow fibres were inhaled.’

Never bet against Vera Stanhope’s instincts. You’d think her compatriots and colleagues would know that. Now for the hard work. Who killed Rick and why and could events that transpired decades earlier have led to his murder? Vera has a plan, which she outlines to Joe Ashworth, her second in command. He asks if she is “planning to interview them individually.” No. Vera is very good at lulling potential suspects into a sense of complacency. They underestimate her and are somewhat dismissive because of her down-at-the-heels appearance.

‘I don’t want them clamming up, thinking of themselves as suspects. Though they will be of course. Much more likely that one of them is the killer than that some mysterious stranger turned up in the early hours and climbed in through the window.’

Her last instruction is prophetic—she tells Joe they’ll “need to check the tide times.” The Rising Tide is a winding, twisting tale of imploding friendship. Or was the group flawed from its inception? Readers will devour the 10th Vera Stanhope novel, a thoroughly surprising police procedural.

Another excellent read in the Vera Stanhope series. A little dark and disturbing and time well spent trying to figure out who the killer is !! Thoroughly enjoyed this one ! Read it !

This Vera Stanhope mystery is set on Holy Island, a fascinating place which is connected to mainland Northumberland with a causeway that floods twice a day at high tide. There's something intriguing about an island that's completely connected to civilization EXCEPT when it's not.

Vera and her team investigate a hanging (suicide or murder?) on Holy Island and find themselves simultaneously peeling back the layers of a 50-year-old cold case of drowning (accident or murder?) on the causeway. I found it to be captivating from start to finish. The resolution was really good but I think it would’ve been more impressive if the twice-daily flooding of the causeway had been the center point of the mysteries’ solution.

Part of the fun of reading a novel set in an unfamiliar place is the armchair traveling, and I loved my visit to picturesque Holy Island (also called Lindisfarne) by means of YouTube walking tours. I’m now completely obsessed with the Lindisfarne Gospels, a gorgeous labor of love which was completed in the Holy Island monastery in the early 8th century. This Latin copy of the Gospels includes an interlinear translation (added in the late 10th century) in which each Latin word has its English equivalent written directly above it (believed to be the first rendering of the Gospels in the English language).

Recommended for: Vera fans, of course. And for fans of clever contemporary mysteries with interesting characters, multiple timelines, and lots of layers.

Content: A few profanities. Mentions of rape and sexual harassment (not detailed or shown to the reader).

Many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for a digital advance review copy. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own.

Because Cleeves focused on the victim and the limited pool of suspects at the beginning, I found myself waiting eagerly for Vera to show up. Once she did, it all came together for me. Cleeves has a real talent for character, and in particular the two other detectives really came alive for me through their own points of view.

Most of my exposure to Vera has been through the TV series, so perhaps that's why I was so eager for her to come on stage and kick off the investigation. Great writing, though, and wonderful sense of place. The intimate nature of the island and the retreat really reinforced the plot of the story.