I owe my current state

of bliss to my friend Sheelagh; a Brit herself, and like me a fan of the police procedural, she was the first to alert me to the TV series Vera, starring Brenda Blethyn as DCI Vera Stanhope. Much more recently, just as I had run out of my favourite crime writers (all the dark Scandinavians, all the great Brits, all the Lee Childs), Sheelagh gave me an Ann Cleeves book.

It’s this series which spawned the Vera TV show, and the books, if The Seagull is any indicator, are even better.

For North Americans conditioned to always-beautiful characters and to the notion that tension comes only with torrid love affairs with delectable (but dangerous) women, Vera is improbable — a latemiddle age, frumpy detective.

There’s a scene in The Seagull, for instance, where Vera is sitting on her desk at the station, having just tromped through the muck of a crime scene, and one of her young detectives catches a glimpse of her thick ankles. The endearing, oddly heartbreaking line: “Joe

saw that her feet were filthy and felt a moment of revulsion.”

But Vera is smart, kind and acutely, painfully selfaware too. Joe doesn’t get to feel superior very often.

And for me, the best of all possible news, this is the only one of the series I’ve read. Happily, I have miles to go before I am once again searching for a new writer, even if he or she is unlikely to be as good as Ann Cleeves. Thank you, Sheelagh.