They bonded on that first trip, but what may have really brought them together was the death of Isobel, one of their number, at their first reunion five years later. From Ann Cleeves— New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of the Vera and Shetland series, both of which are hit TV shows— comes the stunning tenth Vera Stanhope novel, The Rising Tide, a powerful novel about guilt, betrayal, and the longheld secrets people keep. Now, it crossed his mind again that Judith, the teacher who’d brought them together, might make a suitable partner, that he might find company and intimacy in old age. Anyway, the partners complement each other: Taylor is the more rational and level-headed, while Brodie blatantly disregards jurisdictional boundaries when he needs to.

The Rising Tide: A dark, atmospheric mystery from bestseller

Varvello’s boy of the title is never named, but his presence is all-encompassing – although it is only towards the end that we start to see the world through his anguished eyes in this darkly eloquent and moving novel. Pietro, the father, finds a notebook filled with his daughter’s handwriting, her brother’s name scrawled repeatedly on the page.But then he commits an attack that will change everything, for himself and his family, for the rest of their lives. As ever, Cleeves goes deeper, examining the precarious nature of life and what it is to age and face your own mortality.

The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves | Waterstones The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves | Waterstones

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. In bestseller Cleeves’s melancholy 10th Vera Stanhope novel (after 2020’s The Darkest Evening), sexagenarians Rick Kelsall, Annie Laidler, and two other old friends reunite at the tidal island convent-turned-guesthouse where they met as teens during a school retreat.And there had been a connection, so strong and fierce that after fifty years the tie was still there, unbroken and still worth celebrating. 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. Perhaps the conversion had begun a little later, the evening of the same day, when he’d sat in this chapel in the candlelight with his friends and they’d cried together, trying to make sense of Isobel’s passing. Vera Stanhope is one of the literary world’s most realistic detectives… This just might be my favorite Vera book, at least thus far.

The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves - Publishers Weekly The Rising Tide by Ann Cleeves - Publishers Weekly

There’d been no physical contact – it hadn’t come to that – but Philip had sensed the tension, which was so different from the weekend’s general mood of easy companionship. Fifty years ago, a group of teenagers spent a weekend on Holy Island, forging a bond that has lasted a lifetime.

They can’t quite believe it when rumours start to spread that he has been breaking into his neighbours’ homes and stealing things. He’d known after all that the tide was rushing in and it would be foolhardy to attempt the crossing.

The Rising Tide: A Vera Stanhope Novel (Vera Stanhope, 10) The Rising Tide: A Vera Stanhope Novel (Vera Stanhope, 10)

The Sunday Times Who doesn’t love ‘large and shabby’ Vera Stanhope, the blunt detective in Ann Cleeves’s Northumberland police procedurals? They first came to the island on a school trip organized by a young teacher hoping to "challenge their preconceptions" on "a kind of secular retreat. Who doesn’t love “large and shabby” Vera Stanhope, the blunt detective in Ann Cleeves’s Northumberland police procedurals?Ann Cleeves is on top form in this atmospheric mystery that gradually expands to include more shifty characters on the mainland, and, on her tenth outing, you feel the pain beneath Vera’s blowsy bravado. One of them, Isobel, died that weekend, rushing off after a row and attempting to drive over the causeway while the tide was rushing in (“Her vehicle had been swept from the causeway in the high tide of the equinox, tossed from the road like a toy by the wind and the waves”). Fans will enjoy matching wits with Cleeves’ eccentric sleuth right up to the dangerous surprise in her denouement.