Tension Redemption Socks and Telling Tales

The knitting: regular ol' socks.

 The novel: Telling Tales by Ann Cleeves.

I  started this pair of socks in the fall of 2018 and then realized my gauge was ridiculous because my tension was affecting my tension.  Terrible joke, but true.  I was knitting during some very unhappy meetings and was gripping the yarn and needles for dear life--I broke one poor bamboo needle just trying to pick up stitches for the heel! The sock turned out too narrow to fit anyone I knew and it would have hurt my hands to try to knit a second sock just as tightly, so I unraveled it this summer and started over again.  I love how these turned out.  

I love the colors and the stripes (the colorway is Route 66) and how technically Patons sock yarn is a sport weight so any socks you make with it knit up quickly and then you have thick, sturdy socks to wear.  Or give to someone you love.  These are going to live in the gift stash until Christmas.  

On to the novel.  Telling Tales.  I got into this much more quickly than The Crow Trap.  The novel starts with dissatisfied young mother, Emma, yearning for Dan, a pottery artist who works across the way, and then turns to memories of discovering the body of her friend, Abbie.  Jeanie, the woman sentenced for the murder of Abbie and former girlfriend of Abbie's father, kills herself in prison just as the murder investigation is re-opened.  Or maybe the investigation is under investigation.  Vera's on it, and then she's on it even more when the Emma's brother, Christopher, is murdered.  Then things really take off.

Secrets are uncovered, alliances are made, and Vera worries about her drinking.  Also, there's some blackmail and a shady land developer for good measure.  Naturally, at least one person worries about their position on the village council.

No one ever seems to worry about their position on the village council before they do something to risk their position on the village council, I swear.

There's a lot of talk about boats that I don't understand, and the setting--a fictional coastal town--is flat, windy, and brown and relentlessly grim.  The men are varying types of terrible: bullies, manipulators, weak-willed obsessives.  The women who love them are mostly terrible in the way that they're defined by their relationships to terrible men.  Vera can't wait to get away from all of them.  I stayed up late last Friday to finish this because I was so excited, so maybe I was a little giggly from fatigue by the end.  But the reveal of the murderer is devastating in a banal sort of way, and everyone's reactions are portrayed as if everyone is playing a role in a murder mystery novel and Vera wishes they would shut up.  Something about the main character in a detective story being irritated at the detective story-ness of it all just tickled me.

I can only imagine Vera's reaction to having stories about her turned into a BBC series.

 Telling Tales ends with Vera preparing to leave town and seeing Emma standing by the window once again.  The last sentence is "It was about time she got a life." and it's unclear as to who Vera is thinking of, but my hopes aren't too high for either woman.  I'm definitely going to read the next book to see if Vera ever does, though.