Ann Cleeves’ Detective Vera Stanhope isn’t much on healthy habits, but she makes an effort in Silent Voices, only to stumble upon a dead body at her local gym. As she investigates, Vera discovers secrets behind the murder that shake the community. Cleeves’ unique voice steers the reader through twists of mystery and the personal ups and downs Vera faces, resulting in a great read. I enjoyed the book and loved seeing it on the small screen in the second season of the Vera BritBox series. 

In this blog I offer a different type of book review­—one that’s combined with vocabulary building. Silent Voicesincluded several interesting terms I’ll highlight here.

From Silent Voices:

The car Vera was driving was large, new and rather expensive. One of the perks of her rank. Mrs. Eliot would consider it the sort of car to be driven by a successful man. Yet Vera was large and shambolic, with bare legs and blotchy skin. She never wore make-up. Vera looked poor. 

shambolic, adjective informal, mainly British English: chaotic, disorganized, or mismanaged. 

From Silent Voices:

She’d bring them down with her superior looks and supercilious words. 

supercilious, adjective: behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others.

From Silent Voices:

She got out of her car and smelled gorse flowers and damp foliage and cows. 

gorse, noun: a yellow-flowered shrub of the pea family, the leaves of which are modified to form spines, native to western Europe and North Africa. 

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 Definitions are typically from the dictionary on my Mac or The New Oxford American Dictionary.

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

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“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