I haven't watched tv's Vera but that's because of having too many things to watch. So I thought I'd try the books. This novel is more than 20 years old now but it doesn't feel too dated. In The Crow Trap we spend half of the book getting to know Rachael, Anne and Grace, three scientists conducting an environmental survey of a proposed quarry site in the Northumbrian hills. Each of these women has secrets. Then a body is found strangled on the hillside, and the small cottage where the women have been staying is suddenly full of the presence of Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope.

Countless books have been written (and tv series and films made) featuring misanthropic male detectives. We all know this guy. He looks older than his years because he's seen too much. He's single, with multiple failed relationships in his past. He drinks too much and he's too pure or something to have toadied his way up the power hierarchy. Yet this psychological train-wreck somehow manages a stellar clearance rate on his cases. Huh. Yeah right.

Female fictional detectives tend to be cut from similar cloth with certain patriarchal adjustments. They are often beautiful and have to fight to have their substantial intellects taken seriously. The price they pay for being so gorgeous and clever is a lack of functioning relationships and a weakness for the bottle. Outside of these stereotypes, Ann Cleeves has created Vera Stanhope. Survivor of an emotionally abusive childhood. Overweight. Suffering from eczema. Yet Vera has a knack for getting the truth out of people. She's bloody-minded and won't suffer fools. She knows she's unattractive and she refuses to let herself care about it, thus defying anyone else to do the same.

Personally, I am looking forward to a time when fat, ugly women rule the universe. In the meantime, I will have to content myself with reading more in this series. ( )

I've been watching the Vera series on TV for quite a while, and thought I'd see how it started with this inaugural mystery. Cleeves takes her time setting up all the characters, leaving only the merest, uncomplimentary traces of Vera until half-way through the book. The first dialog with her characters is so much like the TV dialog it made me laugh. We get a lot of everyone's backstory first, mixed in with the first death, and then the first murder. Lots of red herrings, of course. I did enjoy it, and will follow the series to see if the narrative pattern holds, or if Vera becomes more the center of the stories in the future ( )

First thing to say, I've read and very much enjoyed Ann Cleeves' books before. Second thing, I've not seen the television adaptations, so my views aren't coloured by these.

If this had been my first Ann Cleeves, it might have been my last. She writes well, but in this instance could have benefitted from some serious editing. This is not a story that merits 550 pages.

It's a slow burn. Almost half the story is taken up in introducing the plot from the standpoint of the three environmental scientists who come together to survey a piece of land in the northern Pennines, which might become the site of a new quarry. On the whole, there was too much information.

DI Vera Stanhope, fat, unhealthy and acerbic only makes her entrance after the three women have had their story told. The plot continues with its twists and turns. But did I believe the denouement? No, not really. It's often good to feel that a story's clues were there for us to spot if only we'd been cleverer. Here, it felt more like the author herself had invented the twist that solves everything at quite a late stage, because she'd dug herself into a hole from which she was having trouble extricating herself.

Yes, an absorbing-at-times read. A memorable one? No. ( )

(1999) This book introduces Vera, who is the main character in the TV series ?Vera?. However, she doesn't really show up until almost 3/4 of the way thru the book. Causes the book to really drag as it concentrates on three women who are doing environmental studies on a proposed quarry in the area. Turns out opposition raised by Barbara Waugh, the wife of the quarry owner, is only to hide the hidden burial of a young boy she kidnapped years earlier. Only fair as the book does drag.KIRKUS REVIEWA British environmental survey suddenly turns dangerous when several deaths occur.Three very different women¥team leader Rachael Lambert, botanist Anne Preece, and zoologist Grace FulwellÂ¥are hired to check the area of a planned quarry for environmental problems. Arriving at Baikie's Cottage, which is to be the group's home base, Rachael finds her friend Bella, who lives nearby, hanged in the shed along with a suicide note. Despite this gruesome discovery, the survey mostly goes as planned, although Grace, an uncommunicative young woman, observes an amazing number of otters in the stream running through the area. The owners of the land the quarry is on, Robert and Livvy Fulwell, are eager to see the project approved. The owners of nearby Slateburn Quarries, Godfrey and Barbara Waugh, are less enthusiastic, but the survey continues until Grace is found strangled near Baikie's. Assigned to the case is Inspector Vera Stanhope, who often visited the cottage years ago with her father, a friend of the rather famous lady who owned it. As Vera seeks answers, she finds so many threads that link Bella's suicide and Grace's murder that it becomes hard to tell whether the murder is rooted in the quarry project or past secrets.This first installment in Cleeves' Vera Stanhope series, now published in the U.S. for the first time, offers abundant evidence why the police-detective heroine, physically unattractive but extremely clever, and her meticulously plotted adventures (The Moth Catcher, 2016, etc.) have made such a splash in bookstores and in the TV series Vera.Pub Date: Feb. 21st, 2017ISBN: 978-1-250-12274-2Page count: 560ppPublisher: MinotaurReview Posted Online: Dec. 7th, 2016Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15th, 2016

I read this book, because I quite enjoyed the Vera TV show. But I'm pretty sure I won't be reading any more of Cleeves' books.

I'm not a fan of modern fiction. I've read much worse than The Crow Trap, but it was more like an R-rated movie than I had hoped it would be. YMMV. ( )