The cantankerous Vera Stanhope is forced to consider her neighbor a murder suspect in The Glass Room. The story is intriguing enough it became an episode of the Vera show on BritBox. I love the books but find the Northeast England scenery on screen a beautiful treat to savor. In this case, I absolutely enjoyed both. Cleeves does an excellent job with her characters and giving readers a twist only Vera can sort.

In this blog, I offer a different type of book review­; one that’s combined with vocabulary building. The Glass Room included plenty of interesting words. I’m highlighting just three here:

From The Glass Room:

A sort of value-added B&B. And New Writing North covers the cost of the bursaries, so it’s all profit.

bursary, noun (plural bursaries) British English — 1. a scholarship to attend a college or university. 2. The room of a bursar in a college or school. 3. the treasury of an institution, especially a religious one.

From The Glass Room:

Chrissie’s mother was a good cook; she studied recipes with the assiduous concentration of an academic.

assiduous, adjective—showing great care and perseverance.

From The Glass Room:

Nina was reminded of a fictional character and struggled to remember which one, and then it came to her: Samantha, the eponymous cruel woman in Miranda’s novel.

eponymous, adjective—(of a person) giving their name to something, or (of a thing) named after a particular person.

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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