Murder is a form of art in Author Anne Cleeves’ Hidden Depths. A woman finds her son strangled, his body left in a bath filled with flowers in this third Vera Stanhope mystery. Another body turns up floating in water with wildflowers decorating the murder scene. The murders set a community into turmoil and fear. Cleeves’ writing style thrives with her characterization in every book she pens, but the onery and tenacious detective Vera Stanhope is my favorite character she’s written. 

In this blog, I offer a different type of book review­—one that’s combined with vocabulary building. Cleeves’ third novel featuring Vera Stanhope included a couple of interesting Scottish/English terms I’ll highlight here.

From Hidden Depths:

He was a bit of a scally. In and out of trouble with the police, but when you talked to him you could see why. His dad had been in prison for most of the time he was growing up, and his mam never seemed to bother with him much. 

scally, noun, (slang definition) In British dialect, especially Northern England — a mischievous person or a rebellious working-class youth. 

From Hidden Depths:

Surely he didn’t talk like that while he was in the watch tower and the skuas were streaming past in a northerly gale. Then he’d shout and swear like the rest of them. 

skua, noun: a large brownish predatory seabird related to the gulls, pursuing other birds to make them disgorge fish they have caught. 

—

 Definitions are typically from the dictionary that comes with my Mac or The New Oxford American Dictionary.

—

To connect or learn more about Ann Cleeves, find him at anncleeves.com

—

“The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God’s name would you want to make things worse by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?” ― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft