But with the latest installments, this Vera still seems someone similar to the tv series one and also separate at times. He’d been in his first-floor room in the Pilgrims’ House looking down, an observer, not a participant. If one of the women who’d shared that first weekend of connection had been free, perhaps that would have worked. Cleeves, who captures the world and its people in shades of gray tone, evokes compelling images of nostalgia, sadness, yearning, envy…and murder.

A group of friends who knew each other in grammar school gather every five years on Holy Island for a weekend together.Eager to ID the killer and find out why early reviewers were commenting as they were, I turned to the book for the final chapters.

With Vera, Joe, and Holly on Holy Island they realize that a group of friends who have been coming to the island for 50 years may know more than they are saying after their friend is found dead by hanging. A group of aging friends meet every five years on Holy Island off the Northumberland coast for the past 50 years.Every five years, these former school mates meet for a reunion on Holy Island, a small piece of land that becomes a literal island at high tide.