Vera is an ITV detective television series based on the works of crime author Ann Cleeves, who also wrote the books that The BBC series Shetland is based on.
The central character is Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope of the Northumberland & City police, played by Brenda Blethyn. She is obsessive about her work and driven by her own demons. If she's lonely she doesn't show it and faces the world with caustic wit, guile and courage. She plods along in a constantly dishevelled state, but has a calculating mind, and despite her irascible personality, she cares deeply about her work and comrades. In many respects, she can be likened to a female Columbo.
Her long-suffering right-hand man was Detective Sergeant (DS) Joe Ashworth (David Leon) from series 1-4. From series 5-12, DS Aiden Healy (Kenny Doughty) took over Ashworth's spot. Starting in series 13, Ashworth will return to the show.
Vera contains examples of:
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- 2xFore: The Victim of the Week in "Witness" was done in by a wooden plank that happened to be lying around for some fencing repairs.
- Aborted Arc: Vera is diagnosed with angina in Series 4, which is never brought up again afterwards, which is strange, as you would have thought that the stress of all those murder investigations since would have brought on another attack at some point, even if she is on medication for it.
- Absence of Evidence: In "Tuesday's Child", Vera realises that a story that the Victim of the Week had left of his own accord is false when she searches the victim's holdall and discovers that he hadn't packed his insulin. As she puts it, why would he leave behind the one thing he depended on for survival?
- Abusive Offspring: Mia, the daughter of one of the suspects in "Recovery," managed to give her mother a rather impressive black eye after an argument.
- Accidental Misnaming:
- During his first case ("Changing Tides."), Aiden gets called Joe at various times by Vera.
- The NCA officer in "Tyger Tyger," who calls Mark Mike, which makes him even less inclined than he already was to work with her.
- Accidental Murder:
- The Victim of the Week in "The Deer Hunters" is shot when he attempts to wrestle a rifle away from a friend who was attempting to illegally shoot a stag.
- The victim in "The Sea Glass," was killed by his son after an argument, which the son ended with a right hook that killed him. If the son had admitted what he had done there and then, he probably would have got away with manslaughter, however, when he decided to try and dump the body at sea, it became a murder charge instead.
- The Victim of the Week in "Dirty" died after receiving a head injury in a fight he had got into with a childhood friend. While the friend had every intention of hitting them, they didn't intend to kill them.
- The Victim of the Week in "Recovery," died from exposure after failing unconscious from injuries they had received after being attacked earlier that day in a forested area on a cold night. If you listen carefully at the end, you can hear Aiden charge the perpetrator with manslaughter rather than murder during his You Do Not Have to Say Anything spiel.
- The first Victim of the Week in "Tyger Tyger," who is knocked over by a HGV when trying to get his colleague out of it’s path.
- The Victim of the Week in "Tender" after a struggle during an argument causes a blood clot to form in their neck.
- Adaptation Expansion: The first couple of series were based on the books by Ann Cleeves. After that they are mostly original stories, though new books continue to be adapted as they appear.
- Adapted Out: Charlie, one of the detectives in the books, appeared very briefly in the first episode ("Hidden Depths."), and never appeared again. Kenny, who didn’t appear in the first episode, nor the books, seems to have been written in to fill this role in the show instead.
- Affably Evil: The murderers in "Dark Road," "The Blanket Mire," and "Cold River."
- All a Part of the Job: Explored a little in "Blue": Vera is exasperated about being offered a medal of service for much this reason, saying to Aiden that they ought to give medals to the bereaved instead. Meanwhile, she ends up questioning an officer in relation to the death of his colleague and he complains angrily about working long night shifts and dealing with criminals he feels have more rights than he does. Vera simply tells him that that's the job.
- The Alleged Car: The beaten up, rusting, sputteringnote Land Rover Defender that Vera inherits from her father and becomes her trademark vehicle. At one point, brand new DC Cherradi nearly mistakes it for an abandoned car at a crime scene. It actually comes in handy more than once compared to the stock police sedans, given the number of crime scenes that take place offroad.
- Amoral Attorney: The father of the Victim of the Week's secret lover was involved in the dodgy deal to buy the old University building and turns out to be the murderer, in "Broken Promise," and the Smug Snake lawyer in "Blood and Bone," who Vera threatens to report to the Law Society.
- Analogy Backfire: In "Young Gods", the headmaster of an exclusive private school refers to a group of students as "golden lads and girls". Later Joe points out to Vera that the poem she was quoting was actually about death and is typically read at funerals:"Golden lads and girls must all as chimney sweepers come to dust."
- Ascended Extra: Mark and Shepherd both appeared in small roles in seasons prior to becoming full members of the team. Jac appeared as a minor supporting character in the episode before she ended up joining the team properly.
- Asshole Victim: In "Young Gods", the first Victim of the Week harassed his ex to such a ruthless degree that her response to finding out that he's dead is 'thank God'.
- Ate His Gun: The Victim of the Week in "Sandancers" is murdered in such a way as to make it look like he ate his gun. Later, another soldier actually commits suicide this way which muddies the waters of the investigation.
- Audit Threat: In "Dark Angel", Vera and Aiden interview a recalcitrant pawnbroker. When she claims to have no record of the man they are investigating, they start to leave, then Vera looks around the shop and announces that she reckons most of the gear in here is bent and asks Aiden how long it will take him to get a warrant. Aiden replies "20 minutes" and Vera calmly starts talking about they can come back here and pull the place apart. At this point the pawnbroker cracks and tells them what they want to know.
- Autopsy Snack Time:
- In "Telling Tales", The Coroner Billy swallows antibiotics while he is in the autopsy room with a corpse on the slab.
- In "Vital Signs", Vera arrives at the morgue to find Malcolm sitting at his computer eating a bag of crisps. When Vera points out eating in the lab is against the rules, Malcolm comments that he won't tell is she doesn't. Vera helps herself to a handful of crisps before leaving.
- Banging for Help: In "A Certain Samaritan", the Victim of the Week is thrown off an overpass and lands on top of a truck passing underneath. He breaks his back in the fall and raps on the top of the truck in an attempt to attract attention. The truck driver hears the banging but ignores it and the victim dies somewhere on the motorway network between Newcastle and Portsmouth.
- Batter Up!: In "Darkwater", a violent suspect uses a baseball bat to smash up the car of the Victim of the Week's father. He then uses it to threaten the father, telling him that if he is not gone in 24 hours, he is coming back for him.
- Battle in the Rain: In "On Harbour Street", suspect Malcolm Kenrich knocks out Kenny, and grabs another suspect (Ryan Darrow) whom he believes is guilty, and drags him out into the middle of a marsh to kill him. By the time Vera arrives to break it up, it is pouring with rain and Malcolm is half strangling, half drowning Ryan.
- The Beard: In "Broken Promise", the Victim of the Week is secretly in a relationship with a Jerk Jock. The victim's best friend is the jock's girlfriend, and is secretly being used as a beard to hide the relationship.
- Bearer of Bad News: As a murder detective Vera has to do this a lot, however "Blood Will Tell", took it up to eleven when she had to tell the estranged wife of the Victim of the Week that her husband was dead at the wake of her father’s funeral.
- Beastly Bloodsports: In "The Moth Catcher", one suspect turns out to have an alibi when Vera learns the blood on his jeans is badger blood, and discovers he had been 'lamping'—illegally hunting badgers by blinding them with bright lamps—at the time of the murder.
- Beneath Suspicion: Nine times out of the ten, the murderer will turn out to be someone who is important enough to the plot to be there, but who is not part of the main storyline.
- The Big Board: Vera's first action on returning to the squad room after viewing the Victim of the Week is to set up a board with a photo of the victim, photos of suspects, timelines and whatever clues they have. It is added to over the course of the investigation as new facts are discovered.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: Lots, but special mention has to go to the families from "Death of a Family Man," "Protected," "Home", and "Blood Will Tell".
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
- The Victim of the Week in "Natural Selection" was this, at least at times.
- Jasmine, one of the Victim of the Week's childhood friends in "Dirty." Although she came across as nice enough, she was having an affair with a colleague, which ended her engagement, and then it turned out she had actually pushed another girl to her death when she was a teenager, told everyone it was suicide, which they had brought for years, all the while pretending to be traumatised at witnessing it.
- Bittersweet Ending: Generally the best you can hope for. Vera doesn't really do "closure": yes, the law will be upheld and the murderer will be caught, but there won't be much satisfaction in it. Often, the Sympathetic Murderer, Enfant Terrible, Broken Pedestal or Mistaken Identity tropes will come into play to ensure that Vera is left with a bitter taste in her mouth, despite successfully solving the case.
- Blaming the Victim: In the Season 11 episode "As The Crow Flies", it's revealed that two sisters, Fern and Zara, were molested by their late uncle (he actually caused the car accident that killed him while trying to assault Zara, who fought back). When Vera confronts the man's wife, she at first insists it's untrue and then says that Fern was at fault, as she would walk around in nothing but a towel and her husband told her his victim came onto him (Fern would've been in her teens at the time). The young woman later tells Vera she got the impression that her grandmother blamed her too and insisted they forget about it, which eventually prompted her to move out when she was seventeen.
- Blood Is Squicker in Water: In "Silent Voices", the Victim of the Week is murdered while swimming in a stream. There is a shot of blood from her head wound flowing into the water and being diluted.
- Book Ends: "Dark Road" begins and ends with Vera announcing that she is going to walk because she needs to clear her head.
- Boulder Bludgeon: The Victim of the Week in "Silent Voices" is bashed over the head with a rock and then held underwater until she drowns.
- British Brevity: Each series has four episodes, though they tend to run for longer than the average TV episode (usually around 90 minutes excluding adverts). Series Eleven had six episodes, with two being shown in November 2021, with the rest then spread throughout 2022, probably to make up for the fact that there were no new episodes shown in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting filming.
- Broken Pedestal: In "Old Wounds", Vera and Aiden visit a former officer who Vera notes had been accused of inappropriate conduct but who had given her a lot of encouragement in her younger days, and it's clear that while she doesn't dismiss the allegations she still holds him in high regard. It comes out that he's the killer, having killed the Victim of the Week because she had photographic proof of his undercover activities, and that he had convinced the original investigating officer to put little effort into the case, shattering Vera's respect for him completely to the point she all but blames herself for not seeing the signs something was wrong sooner and very icily notes she's letting him say farewell to his ill wife for the wife's sake, note his.
- The Bus Came Back: Joe Ashworth, after leaving at the end of Series 4, returns in Series 13.
- By-the-Book Cop: Vera herself. The Victim of the Week in "Blue" was one as well, to the point of Black-and-White Morality.
- Camera Spoofing: In "Natural Selection", Vera realises what is wrong with the footage of a seemingly empty beach following an "Eureka!" Moment when Aiden comments about the cells being full because it is a full moon. Vera suddenly realises that the murder occurred when the moon was almost full, but the middle section of the footage shows a waxing moon, meaning that someone swapped that section for footage taken a week earlier.
- Candlelit Bath: In "Hidden Depths", the first Victim of the Week is found strangled in a candlelit bath surrounded by handpicked wildflowers.
- Canon Foreigner: Only Vera (obviously), Joe, Holly and Billy appeared in the original novels, making every other Detective/Pathologist this.
- Car Cushion: In "Shadows in the Sky", the Victim of the Week is shoved off the top of a multi-storey carpark and lands on a car parked on the ground; seemingly the only car in an otherwise deserted row.
- Car Fu:
- The second Victim of the Week in "Castles In The Air," was killed when the murderer ran her over.
- In "Black Ice", the Victim of the Week is murdered when the killer uses a van to ram her car from behind and force it off road.
- One of the suspects in "Blue" was knocked over in a hit and run organised by the Victim of the Week’s father, who believed he had something to do with his son’s death. He didn’t, and he survived his encounter with the car.
- The Victim of the Week in "Fast Love," is killed when they are mowed down by a car on a bridge.
- Catapult Nightmare: Joe's daughter Jessie has one as she relives finding a dead body on a train in "On Harbour Street".
- Cat Scare: In "The Moth Catcher", Hachim is searching a darkened garage when he is suddenly startled by a dog that had been sitting silently in one corner till then. This amuses Aiden greatly, especially when the dog is brought out still shaking.
- Character Name Alias: In "Vital Signs", Aiden is investigating a Ransacked Room and speaks to an Irishman who claims to be a neighbour and gives his name as 'David Allen'. When he reports this later, Vera is incredulous about about an Irishman named 'David Allen'—to Aiden's confusion—and it is left to Kenny to point out that Dave Allen was a famous Irish comedian (although, in Aiden's defense, he may be too young to remember him).
- Chekhov's Skill: Vera's sign language course with the police comes in handy in "Muddy Waters", when she can tell that a mother is misleadingly translating her son's sign language.
- Child by Rape: The Victim of the Week in "Fast Love" was given up for adoption after his birth mother became pregnant after being raped, and couldn't bear to keep him.
- Closed Circle: Zigged zagged in "The Rising Tide." The Victim is found in cottage being rented by a group of friends on a island that is only accessible at low tide due to the causeway being flooded by the sea the rest of the time. At first it looks like that this trope is in play until Vera checks the tide times, and realises that the causeway was open that night, which meant that anyone could have drove across from the mainland to commit the crime.
- Clothing Combat: The Victim of the Week in “For the Grace of God” had already suffered a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown at the hands of two other people that left him drifting in and out of consciousness, when he gets suffocated with his own scarf by the murderer, who happens to come across him.
- Coffin Contraband: In "Home", the police search the house of woman acting as a middleman in a scheme to smuggle drugs into prison. Vera finds the drugs hidden in a funerary urn the woman claimed contained the ashes of her late husband.
- Cold Cash: In "Cuckoo", Vera is interviewing a drug dealer who protests his innocence until Vera tells him that they found ten grand in cash hidden under the fish fingers in his freezer.
- Contrived Coincidence: In "Young Gods", the murder is prompted by the fact that the killer's granddaughter just so happens to have had a haircut at the same salon where the victim's ex works so she could overhear that the victim was harassing the ex and tell her grandfather about it.
- Convenient Terminal Illness: In "Young Gods", after the killer is caught, he confesses to Vera and then adds that he will not live to stand trial. He has lung cancer, and has three months to live; six at the most. He received the diagnosis the same day that he learned the information that caused him to commit murder, and took it as sign.
- Cool Car: Vera's vintage Land Rover.
- The Coroner: The irreverent Dr. Billy Cartwright in seasons 1 to 3, who had numerous quirks (such as hiding car magazines in the ceiling of his office) and was probably only a pathologist because no living patient could tolerate him. He was replaced in seasons 3-8 by Dr. Marcus Summer, who was younger but more serious. Series 9-12 gave us Dr. Malcolm Donahue, who was even more abrasive than Billy. Malcolm was replaced halfway through series 12 by Dr Paula Bennett, who’s turned out to be just as obnoxious as he was.
- Corpse Temperature Tampering: Late in the investigation in "The Blanket Mire", Tony contacts Vera and tells her that the breakdown of the proteins in the muscles of the Body of the Week indicate she was actually killed five weeks ago—on the night she disappeared—and that something interfered with the decomposition making it look like she had been killed later. This means that Vera's investigation has been working under a false assumption the entire time. Vera later discovers that the killer had stashed her body in a refrigerated unit used for storing vegetables before he disposed of the body.
- Corrupt Bureaucrat: The Victim of the Week’s boss in “Against the Tide,” who was the head of the council’s licensing department, who, when head of another department, had helped her then husband’s company get a contract for bus route by telling him about rival bids, allowing him to undercut them, and then tried to get the Victim of the Week sacked when she realised that knew all about it after he had started to investigate the bus company.
- Corruption of a Minor: The drug gang in "Cuckoo" were using teenagers to run drugs into the coastal towns. Vera was less than impressed, and threatened to charge the gang leader with exploitation of a child and child slavery.
- CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: Averted in "Cold River," where Malcolm comment's that the CPR attempted on the Victim of the Week actually broke her ribs. He then says that it was pointless to try anyway, since she was already very dead by that point.
- Cut-and-Paste Suburb: Vera gets lost while trying to navigate her way through a mazelike suburb of identical houses to a crime scene at the start of "Home."
- Cut Himself Shaving: In "On Harbour Street," Vera asks a prostitute how she got her black eye. She replies that she "banged her head."
- Dark and Troubled Past: Many of the Victim of the Week will have one, and it is what will usually lead to their deaths, no matter how indirectly.
- Dating Service Disaster: In "Darkwater", Vera discovers that the Victim of the Week has been using to a local message board to catfish his bullies by thinking they were communicating with a Hot Teacher. This suddenly changes the nature of the case, as Vera realises he was not only the victim, but also a perpetrator.
- Dead Animal Warning: The Victim of the Week in "Young Gods" is Gideon Frane; a domestic abuser responsible for 97 incidents of harassment against his ex-girlfriend. One of these acts was drowning her pet cat and leaving it own her doorstep for her to find.
- A Deadly Affair: In "Vital Signs", infidelity looks like the obvious motive when Vera and her team discover the married Victim of the Week was having an affair with a married co-worker. However, over the course of the investigation, several other strong motives for murder turn up. Ultimately, the affair was the reason she was killed, but Vera has to work out which of the multiple aggrieved parties was responsible.
- Death by Falling Over:
- The Victim of the Week in "Darkwater" was killed during a violent argument when he was shoved off the bank of a lake; falling on rocks and smashing his skull and breaking his neck.
- In "The Way the Wind Blows", the Victim of the Week dies in an argument with her partner after she is Mistaken for Cheating. Shoved, she falls and hits her head on the dock railing. The killer makes the situation worse by dumping her body in the river.
- Detective Mole: In "Old Wounds", Vera investigates a cold case when skeletal remains are found in the woods. The murderer turns out to have been the supervising officer on the original missing person case, who encouraged the investigating officer to do a slipshod job and write the case off as a runaway.
- Determinator: The killer in "Poster Child" survived being blown up by a stray airstrike, being buried for days in the rubble and going through crude surgery with no anaesthetic, then later came all the way from Iraq to the UK, found his long-lost sister, and came very close to taking her out of the country even after taking a bullet to the gut with nothing but painkillers to keep him going, ultimately submitting to his wounds just before he could escape.
- Dirty Cop:
- The murderer in "Old Wounds."
- The head of the Fraud squad in "Blood and Bone."
- In "The Seagull", John Brace. It also appears that Vera's dad was as well, but it turns out he suspected wrongdoing but didn't have enough evidence - and took hush money to keep Vera safe from any negative consequences.
- The Victim of the Week’s father, who had long since retired, in ”Blue.”
- Disability Alibi: In "Tuesday's Child", Vera works out that one suspect who was involved in the disposal of a body could not have been acting alone because he had a broken arm at the time (the result of the same accident that killed the victim):"Unless you're the world's greatest one-armed gravedigger!"
- Disowned Parent: In "Home.", the Victim of the Week tells her husband, children, and everyone else she knows that she is an orphan with no other family, and grew up in a care home. Once Vera and the team start to investigate her death, however, it turns out that her father and brother are very much alive, and she had walked out on them years ago, disowning them in the process.
- Disposing of a Body: In Season 8's "Blood and Bone", a body is found in the incinerator of an abattoir.
- Domestic Abuse: Part of the motive in "Dark Road": the victim was a mother helping her daughter escape an abusive husband, only to be killed when the husband found out what was going on.
- Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male:
- Averted in "The Moth Catcher," when Vera charges one girl who has been beating up her boyfriend with assault, telling her in the process that she doesn't care what the gender of the abusive partner is, abuse is still abuse.
- Averted again in “Against the Tide,” where the wife of the Victim of the Week was beating up him and their son. Vera treats it just a seriously as male on female domestic abuse.
- Driven to Suicide:
- In "The Moth Catcher", one suspect hangs herself in the barn when it becomes obvious that she is going to be exposed as a hit-and-run driver. Which solves one of the deaths Vera is investigating, but not the other.
- In "The Ghost Position", Vera's old colleague Stuart sends her to get him a coffee to get her out of the way, then throws himself from an upper floor of the hospital they're in to ground level.
- Eagleland Osmosis: Joe, in an early episode, refers to the crime scene technicians as the CSI, but they have never been called that in Britain, they are usually referred to as being Forensics, or sometimes Scene of Crime officers ([SOCO] for short). Later episodes fixed this by calling them Forensics instead.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: Vera is famous for three things - her gruffness, her hat and her Land Rover. Only one of the three was present in the pilot ("Hidden Depths") and it wasn’t the hat or car. There was also no Kenny, and their investigation room was basically a very small meeting room, not the open plan office that is more familiar to viewers now.
- Empathic Environment: Northumberland (North-East England) is shot to look as moody and grey as possible, mirroring the somewhat bleak, pessimistic feel of the show. The sky is almost permanently overcast.
- Enhance Button: Appears frequently, especially when clarifying still images from CCTV footage.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Expect Vera to have one about 15 minutes towards the end of the episode, thus solving the case from some overlooked clue, offhand comment, or remembering Exact Words (See below).
- Exact Words: Remembering a character's specific words can result in Vera's "Eureka!" Moment of the case. Sometimes a character using plural pronouns instead of singular.
- False Confession:
- A non-murderous version occurs in "Home," when the son of the neighbour of the Victim of the Week confesses to sending malicious emails to her, to protect his mother who was the actual sender of them.
- One of the soldiers in “Sandancers,” tries to falsely confess to the murder of the Victim of the Week. Vera quickly works out that it wasn’t him, and assumes that he thought he had done it because he was in the house at the time, but passed out drunk, and he had thought he had done it but couldn’t remember. However, since he later commits suicide, she then starts wonders if it was in fact a cry for help instead to save him from himself.
- In “Vital Signs,” the Victim of the Week’s coworker, who the victim was also having an affair with, confesses to murdering her to protect the real killers - his wife and daughter. Vera is suspicious of this confession though, because as a medical professional, they would have recognised the signs that the victim was not dead from the blow of the head they said had killed her.
- Family Relationship Switcheroo: In "Protected", this kind of relationship lies at the bottom of the murder. The Victim of the Week was actually the son of his elder 'sister'; having been born when she was 15. Although estranged from her family, and married with a family of her own, she remained close to her son. She finally tells him the truth, which sets in motion the chain of events that results in his murder.
- Fictional Counterpart: The Northumberland and City police force that Vera works for are a stand in for the two real life constabulary’s that would cover her patch in real life - Northumbria and Tyne and Wear.
- Fiery Cover-Up: In "The Sea Glass", one suspect torches the boat that was used to dispose of the Body of the Week. They do not do a very thorough job and Vera and her crew find traces of blood on the prow.
- Finally Found the Body: The first Victim of the Week’s in "Old Wounds," and the second Victim of the Week in "Tuesday’s Child," (Though they were the first to die chronologically, their body was found afterwards) are finally found years after they disappeared. Everyone had assumed that they had run away.
- Flanderization: DC Kenny Lockhart was very much an active part of the investigating team early on, almost forming a team of three with Vera and Joe, but over time has come to be treated as only good for drudge work.
- As of series 9 & 10, Kenny is getting more prominence again, and it is clear that Vera regards him as the most valuable member of the team after Aiden. And he is the only one allowed to answer back to her.
- Flat Character: DC Jac Williams, who has no where near the amount of characterisation that her predecessor’s had, and, as one critic noted, only seems to exist to help push some plot points forward each episode. Mark also suffers from this as well, but not as badly.
- Fresh Clue: In "Cuckoo", Vera and Aiden bust into a drug dealer's flat to find it deserted. Aiden touches a mug of tea and comments that is still warm.
- Friend to All Children: Vera's gruffness disappears whenever she's talking to children.
- Furnace Body Disposal: In "Blood and Bone", after killing DC Harry Fenton, the killer attempts to dispose of his body by sneaking it into a local abattoir's incinerator, whose owner was known for Cutting Corners. However, a power outage leads to the workers discovering it before the body is reduced to ash. As such, whilst most of it was severely damaged beyond recognition, Fenton's internal organs and fingerprints were still intact, allowing them to get a quick identification.
- Get Out!: In "Telling Tales", Vera pulls Kenny off the case after discovering he's leaked information about it to her now retired predecessor (his former boss). When he later shows up at the office anyway and insists he wants to help, she angrily yells at him to leave.
- The Ghost: Aiden’s wife Sam, who is often mentioned, but who has only ever been seen very briefly once.
- Ghost Extras: The office is full of people who are presumably working on various non-murder cases. Sometimes they'll gather round to listen to Vera's latest summary of her investigation, but only the core team ever actually contribute.
- Green-Eyed Monster: In "Poster Child", the titular child's adoptive sister feels ignored due to all the attention Mira gets, leading her to fool Mira's brother into coming from Iraq to the UK to 'take her home'.
- Grief-Induced Split:
- In "Old Wounds", Bill Telling and Beryl Doyle divorced after their teenage daughter, Carrie, went missing during a miner's strike that turned violent; the police dismissed Carrie as a runaway, especially because she was a miner's daughter and biracial. Bill and Beryl's relationship was already rocky; Bill had a nasty temper which worsened due to his grief turning to bitterness, he often worked long hours down the mines and rarely saw Beryl, who felt isolated and eventually had a brief affair with an undercover police officer. They parted on bad terms and didn't see or speak to each other for three decades until Carrie's skeletal remains are uncovered; when Vera asks Bill if he knows where his ex-wife is so they can inform her, he snarks that she's "somewhere in hell, I hope". They manage to reach something of an understanding after visiting the place where Carrie's body was buried together.
- In "Protected", Larry Crowe and his wife divorced after their fifteen-year-old son Patrick died falling from the roof of the Kenworthy family's house, allegedly during a botched burglary; Larry doesn't believe Patrick was a thief and insists the Kenworthys covered something up (he's right). Larry tells Vera that Patrick's death and his fixation on the alleged cover-up "ruined everything" for him and his ex-wife. After he learns the truth behind Patrick's death, Larry finds some peace and wishes his ex-wife was still alive so she could've had peace too.
- Grievous Bottley Harm: In "Telling Tales", a householder gets hospitalized when an intruder who has broken in to retrieve some some incriminating evidence smashes him over the head with a bottle.
- Hardboiled Detective: Vera is a British version.
- Heartwarming Orphan: Deconstructed in "Poster Child". The titular war orphan, Amira, is transported from Iraq to the UK (one of the countries that invaded Iraq) for lifesaving surgery, is made a brief media sensation (winning a photojournalist an award for a pic taken of her), and is adopted with a new name. And then it turns out that her brother is still alive and that all his attempts to obtain custody of her have been rebuffed thanks to a family friend with influence in the government ensuring the applications are turned down.
- Hero's Classic Car: Vera's temperamental Land Rover Defender.
- Heroic Blue Screen of Death: In "Dark Road", Vera goes into this state after Bethany is shot dead by the suspect of the week, ending the episode by just aimlessly walking away from Aiden, saying she needs to clear her head.
- Hidden Depths: In "Dark Angel", Kenny unexpectedly reveals that he speaks Latin. And in "The Darkest Evening", he identifies a quote as coming from Troilus and Cressida by William Shakespeare.
- Human Traffickers: While investigating a murder in "The Sea Glass", Vera discovers that the Victim of the Week was involved with a human trafficking ring. The skipper of trawler would smuggle in illegal immigrants and drop them on a remote part of the coast, where the victim would pick them up in a van and deliver them to various locations. While Vera shuts the operation down, it turns out only to tangentially connected to why the man was murdered.
- I Am Not My Father: The son of the ageing gangster who owned the titular nightclub in "The Seagull," insists on this, and that his own building business is legit. Vera is suspicious because of the family name, but there was nothing to suggest that the son’s business was anything other than genuine.
- Identification by Dental Records: A unique variation in "Sandancers". A DNA sample from a deceased soldier is needed to identify a blood stain, but the victim's family had already cleaned or disposed of everything that could yield a sample. Then Joe asks if the mother kept any of his baby teeth.
- Improvised Weapon: The Victim of the Week in "Witness" was done in with a wooden plank that happened to the lying around nearby for some fencing repairs, while the Victim of the Week in "Home," was bashed around the head with a rock, as were the two victims in "Silent Voices," before they were drowned, and the Victim of the Week in “Blue.” The Victim of the Week in "Telling Tales," was killed by a Shovel Strike to the head, the Victim of the Week in “Vital Signs,” was knocked out, but not killed, by a fire poker, and the Victim of the Week in “For the Grace of God,” was smothered by their own scarf.
- I Never Said It Was Poison:
- A slight variation in "Old Wounds", as the police already know the man they are arresting is guilty of murder, but his words reveal other information he should not have known. A man murders the man he believed had murdered his daughter (although he was actually innocent). When Vera arrests him, the father says that he had only done to the victim what he had done to his daughter: sneaking up on him and killing him by surprise. Vera notes that the daughter's manner of death had not been made public, meaning that someone with access to the investigation has been leaking information.
- Also shows up in "Dark Road": the suspect asks if a spot he and Bethany are driving past was where the victim's shoes were found, despite having never been told the victim was found without them.
- Also in "Little Lazarus", when the judge Vera is questioning says "he" to refer to the victim's child...who Vera hadn't mentioned was a son.
- Insurance Fraud:
- In "The Sea Glass", an old case of arson turns out to have been a case of insurance fraud. This, in turn, is connected to the current murder.
- In "Blood Will Tell", the business partner of the Victim of the Week burns down their car dealership while attempting to make it look like an attack aimed at his late partner. Vera is suspicious when she checks his finance, and discovers that the only bill he has paid in the last three months is his insurance premiums.
- Invented Individual: In "Protected", a property management firm is running a scam where they are renting out derelict flats to nonexistent tenants and charging the council for the rent.
- Jammed Seatbelts: In "Silent Voices", Joe has to dive into a reservoir to save a woman Trapped in a Sinking Car. It takes several attempts for the two of them to get the seatbelt open.
- Jerkass Victim: The Victim of the Week in “Young Gods,” was terrorising is ex girlfriend by stalking her.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Vera to some extent. While her dismissive treatment of her colleagues (and some of the witnesses) would mean that in real life HR would have an entire shelf full of complaints about her in their office, she does care deeply about them, and the investigation, but she just doesn’t quite know how to show it properly, and her team still respect her.
- Jurisdiction Friction:
- In "Tyger Tyger," Vera is investigating a hit and run at a port after a robbery, which the National Crime Agency also want to investigate, as they believe it has something to do with a crime family they have under surveillance. Despite the best attempts of the bolshy NCA officer to pull rank, even though she had never investigated a murder before and briefly succeeding in getting Vera booted from the case by claiming that she is incompetent - which results in Kenny and Mark refusing to work with her and Aiden undermining her by giving Vera information, it is Vera who wins the battle by solving the crime, and arresting the perpetrator when reinstated after she discovers that the NCA officer had been paying bribes to an informant to get information.
- In "Sandancers", Vera has to deal with the military due to the Victim of the Week being a soldier found on a military base, finding them both rather eager to see the death ruled as a suicide. After Vera uncovers that that the base commander covered up an incident in which the victim, a high-flying and well-decorated soldier, had threatened to kill a squadmate, the commander attempts to yank her off the case and hand the investigation to the military police officer assisting Vera, only stopped when the MPO directly quotes regulation that states the civilian police must handle it.
- Just Friends: In “Against the Tide,” this leads to the death of the Victim of the Week when his best friend, who has developed romantic feelings for him ends up killing him when those feelings are rejected.
- Just Keep Driving: A Hit and Run happens in "Shadows in the Sky". During a Car Chase a suicidal driver cuts in front of a truck. The truck honks its horn before clipping the car and knocking it off the road, but does not stop afterwards.
- Karma Houdini: The killer in "Young Gods" quite openly confesses to everything they did when caught, only to tell Vera after the interview that they only have six months left to live due to lung cancer and that they don't expect to be in court before then. They were also motivated by this, as a group of students who hounded their teacher son to death after he tried to punish one of them for cheating in an exam and had his complaint struck down by the head teacher, demonstrating to the students that they could get away with anything. Two of the group ended up The Atoner afterward, but one let the power go to his head and continued to abuse others, leading to the killer snapping and murdering him after hearing that he hadn't changed his ways.
- Knight Templar: The killer in "Young Gods" never seems to accept that they did wrong, regarding what they did as justice and even asking Vera if she's never tempted to punish those the law lets escape. Vera quite coldly retorts that it wasn't justice, it was murder, and that sometimes she may be tempted but she wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone was free to do it.
- The Lancer: Joe specifically plays this role for Vera, often clashing with her about her spotty self-care or procedural details. The standout examples come in "Little Lazarus", where he chews her out for not checking with a doctor about a health issue when she'd been right there at the hospital and later for expecting him to go rake through old case files about a judge just because a potentially confused and traumatised child witness is convinced his mother knew said judge.
- Lawman Baton: In "Old Wounds", Vera's team investigates a cold case when a girl's remains are found in the woods twenty years after she disappeared. The murderer was a police officer policing the picket lines during the miners' strike, who killed her by cracking her skull with his baton.
- Lead Police Detective: DCI Vera Stanhope is this for the Northumberland police force.
- Limited Advancement Opportunities:
- Twelve series in, the capable and dependable Kenny Lockhart is still only a Detective Constable. However in the season 3 episode "The Prodigal Son", Vera and Kenny are discussing the Victim of the Week who had been a Detective Constable with the Met for 13 years. When Vera wonders why no promotion, Kenny says that some people just aren't interested in climbing the greasy pole: implying that Kenny may be perfectly happy as a DC and not want the additional responsibility that comes with higher rank
- Averted in the case of Mark Edwards, who we first meet as a young naïve PC in "Little Lazarus." He then pops periodically for various seasons until series 7, when he is promoted to Detective Constable and becomes an official member of the team.
- Loan Shark: While investigating a murder in "Black Ice", Vera and her team uncover a loan shark operation operating under the cover of a taxi firm. Many of the 'drivers' hanging the base are actually the loan shark's enforcers, known as 'dogs' by his clients. While the Victim of the Week was threatening to blow the whistle on his operation, the loan shark turns out not to be responsible for her murder, but still gets shut down.
- Locked in a Freezer: The murderer in "The Blanket Mire," locks a witness who they believe knows too much about them and the victim in a walk in fridge, and puts a padlock on the outside of the door so she can’t escape. Just as she falls unconscious from hypothermia, Vera arrives to rescue her.
- Lotsa People Try to Dun It: The Victim of the Week in “For the Grace of God” had already suffered a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown at the hands of two other people that left him drifting in and out of consciousness, when he get’s suffocated with his own scarf by the murderer, who happens to come across him.
- Love Makes You Crazy: The killer in “The Darkest Evening,” who not only murdered his lover, who was also the mother of his child, but then murdered her neighbour who she was friendly with, and then tried to claim it that the neighbour had brought his murder on himself for getting to close to the first victim.
- Love Makes You Evil: The killer in "Silent Voices", murdered his partner's mother and another man, and attempted to kill a third victim out of fear that they would reveal to her that he'd had an affair with the mother, explicitly stating that he knew it was wrong but nothing else mattered except preserving what he had with her.
- The Main Characters Do Everything: In "The Seagull", Vera and her assistant go to Scotland to interrogate someone instead of having the local police do it.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: In "Darkwater", the body of the Victim of the Week is dumped into a lake in an attempt to make it look like an accidental drowning.
- Man on Fire: In "Young Gods", the Victim of the Week is set on fire when an oil lamp is thrown at him hard enough to chip bone: an act that is witnessed by a group of sixth form students on a retreat.
- The Marvelous Deer: In "The Deer Hunters", the hunting lodge has a legend of a magnificent stag called The Emperor Hadrian that is supposed to wander the preserve and hunters are encouraged to try and find it. The stag is accidentally shot by a poacher in an event that results in the death of the Victim of the Week. Vera discovers the stag's body, but tells no one.
- Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: The sister and brother Sassy and Louis in "The Deer Hunters".
- Matricide:
- The killer in "Home." She had discovered that the Victim of the Week was her biological mother, and when she went to go and tell her who she was, the victim rejected her, so she then bashed her head in with a rock that was in the garden.
- The killer in "As The Crow Flies," turned out to be the Victim of the Week’s oldest daughter, who killed her after a heated argument.
- May–December Romance: The father of the Victim of the Week in "Blind Spot," had left his wife for a woman half his age.
- Missing White Woman Syndrome: In "Old Wounds", the father of the Victim of the Week complains bitterly that no one seriously investigated when his daughter disappeared - instead preferring to believe she had just run away - because she was a miner's child at the time of the miners' strike, and mixed race. Even when her body is found, he does not believe the police will put any effort into finding her killer.
- Mistaken for Cheating:
- In "Shadows in the Sky", the Victim of the Week had been having clandestine meetings with a young woman. His son had discovered this and assumed his father was having an affair. The police consider this as a possible motive as the wife or the son might have murdered him for his infidelity. However, the young woman was actually his daughter from a one-night stand decades before.
- In "Protected", a husband suspects his wife is having an affair when he discovers his wife has a pay-as-you-go mobile phone, and has been lying about working late at the dog shelter. He eventually steals the phone and uses it to lure the younger man she has been meeting into an ambush, where he murders him. He later discovers that the man was not his wife's lover, but her son, who had been raised as her brother following a Family Relationship Switcheroo.
- In "The Way the Wind Blows", the partner of the Victim of the Week was tracking her phone and saw that she was at her her ex-husband's flat. When he went there, he saw them embracing outside. He confronted her and it escalated into an argument where she suffered Death by Falling Over, and he made matters worse by dumping her body in the river. However, she was actually at her ex-husband's place because he was signing over money into a trust for their daughter.
- Molotov Cocktail: Used as a weapon for an attempted murder in "The Ghost Position" where the perpetrator throws three petrol bombs into a house.
- Murder by Inaction: In "Changing Tides", the killer allows the Victim of the Week to go to sleep in an unoccupied chalet and then locks the door from the outside, knowing that she will asphyxiate due to a gas leak from a faulty water heater.
- Murder by Mistake:
- The first Victim of the Week in "Castles In The Air". The killer shot her when she opened the door of the chalet the killer believed their intended victim was staying in. The motion-sensor lights were shining directly in the killer's face and they couldn't see the identity of the woman in the doorway.
- Subverted in "Old Wounds." The father of the Victim of the Week kills the man he believes is guilty of his daughter's murder, and describes to Vera how he had only done to him what he believed he had done to his daughter. Unfortunately for him, the poor guy wasn't the murderer at all. However, the information that the father gave to Vera while confessing does help her catch the real killer.
- In "Black Ice", the killer fatally rams a car off the road; not realising that his intended victim was not the one driving.
- Mystery of the Week: Someone ends up dead in the beginning of the episode, and the rest is spent finding the whys and wherefores.
N-Z
- Never My Fault: The killer in “The Darkest Evening” tried to claim that it was the second Victim of the Week’s own fault for getting murdered, as he shouldn’t have got too close to the killer’s lover, who he had also murdered. This attitude went down about as well as you might expect with Vera.
- Never One Murder: Zig-zagged. Sometimes there is only one murder an episode. Other times there are several, though they aren't necessarily by the same person.
- Never Suicide:
- Played straight and later averted in "Sandancers". The first death is a murder made to look like a suicide. Vera thinks it looks too much like a suicide to actually be a suicide. When a second near-identical death occurs, Vera assumes it is the work of the same killer. This sends the investigation down a blind alley till she realises that the second death actually was suicide.
- In "Dirty," everyone had thought that a girl had committed suicide years before the events of that episode, however it turned out that her friend has pushed her, causing her to fall to her death, which was witnessed by the Victim of the Week. The friend then told everyone that she had committed suicide, and then pretended that she had been traumatised by seeing it happen ever since.
- The Victim of the Week in "The Rising Tide," is found hanging in his bedroom, so naturally everyone thinks he committed suicide until the autopsy results comes back and reveals that he was was actually strangled first, and that he was was strung up to make it look like he had hung himself to disguise that fact.
- No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Happened to the Victim of the Week in "For the Grace of God", that left him seriously injured. He probably would have survived with proper medical care, if the murderer, who had nothing to do with the initial beating, hadn’t come across him…
- No Medication for Me: In "The Moth Catcher", the Victim of the Week is bipolar. Vera and her team discover that she has been off her meds for some time when Marcus discovers no trace of the medication in her system during the autopsy.
- No Snack for You: In "Home", Vera wins the trust of the young son of the Victim of the Week when the Vengeful Vending Machine at the hospital doesn't give him his chocolate, and she hits the machine in the right way to jar the chocolate loose.
- No Sympathy: Poor Aiden. Twice he gets punched in face by suspects that he is trying to arrest in two different episodes, and twice he gets told by Vera that it was his own fault for not ducking out the way.
- Notable Non Sequitur: In "Poster Child", a murder/kidnapping occurs at an isolated property. When she arrives, Vera comments that she almost missed the place and only found the driveway because of the balloons put up to mark it for an upcoming party. Much later, Joe realises that the balloons were in place two days before when the party was due to be held and points this out. Vera then realises that someone inside the home must have put the balloons up to identify it for the kidnapper.
- Not-So-Badass Longcoat: Vera's baggy brown overcoat is unlikely to intimidate anyone, especially when combined with her floppy hat. However, it is undoubtedly warm and practical, given that the series is set Oop North and the weather is constantly overcast and usually drizzling.
- Obfuscating Post Mortem Wounds: In "Muddy Waters", the killer started to strangle the second Victim of the Week then, when that doesn't work, shoots him through the throat: to both mask the marks of strangulation and make it look like a suicide.
- Of Corpse He's Alive: An underplayed (and serious) version in "Natural Selection". The killer props the body of the Victim of the Week up in a seat in the observation hut, and sends a text message from her phone, so witnesses are convinced they saw her alive when they left the island.
- Offing the Offspring:
- The murderer in "Telling Tales"
- The murderer in "Parent Not Expected". though, he was in fact the Victim of the Week’s Stepfather, but he had raised him since a baby, and the kid had always referred to him as Dad until he found out otherwise.
- The murderer in "Tender." It was more a case of Accidental Murder, though.
- In "Silent Voices," the two victims of the week were linked to a woman who had killed her young son (one as the family’s social worker, the other as the then boyfriend) and who was currently serving a life sentence for it. Vera wonders if someone was avenging the kid’s death, since all three had died by drowning, with two also being hit over the head first, but it ultimately doesn’t have anything to do with the murders.
- Old Cop, Young Cop: DCI Vera Stanhope is usually paired with a much younger detective sergeant; originally Joe Ashworth and later Aiden Healy, then Ashworth again.
- Old School Building: In "Broken Promise", Vera is called to the University of Northumberland when Jamie Marshall, a young, promising journalism student, plummets to his death from the top of a disused science building. The investigation keeps returning to the supposedly unsafe building, and Vera eventually realises that the building itself may be at the centre of why he died.
- One-Word Title: The name of the protagonist and nothing else, much like other detective shows such as Colombo and Monk.
- Oop North: Set in Northumberland, North East England, and many of the cast sport strong Northern accents.
- Parental Favoritism: Of the unintentional kind, but still forms part of the back story to the Victim of the Week in "Tender." When her younger sister became ill with cancer, her parent's attention was somewhat understandably directed towards looking after the sister, leaving the victim feeling like she was being ignored and unloved. This then causes her to act out, start to commit petty crime, causing her parents to become exasperated by her due to everything else that was happening, and then leave home. The narration makes it clear that it was unforeseen circumstances that caused this, and that her parents did actually love and care for her very much, and are devastated when she is killed.
- Parental Neglect:
- Vera's father was not the most attentive man by all accounts, with one given in "Young Gods" recounting that a young Vera was once left with no clean clothes and eating cold beans from the tin by the time someone came to check up on her.
- There are hints that the parent's of the Victim of the Week in "The Blanket Mire" did this to both her, and her younger brother. Vera certainly notices that the brother looks unclean, and that he isn't attending school, but it isn't made clear whether this is because the parent's are genuinely neglectful, or if the fact that they were so caught up with searching for, and then grieving for their daughter means that they weren't as attentive to their son as they might otherwise as been.
- Parking Garage: In "Shadows in the Sky", the Victim of the Week is shoved off the top of a multi-storey carpark and lands on a car parked on the ground; seemingly the only car in an otherwise deserted row.
- Patricide: The killer in "The Sea Glass," who killed his father by accident with a punch after an argument. As Vera points out to him, if he had just told the police what he had done when it happened, he probably would have got away with a manslaughter charge, and probably had spent a couple of years in prison at most. However, when he decided to dump the body at sea to disguise what he had done instead, it became murder, and now he was looking at a life sentence.
- Percussive Maintenance: In "Home", Vera wins the trust of the young son of the Victim of the Week when the Vengeful Vending Machine at the hospital doesn't give him his chocolate, and she hits the machine in the right way to jar the chocolate loose.
- Phoney Call:
- In "A Certain Samaritan", Joe takes a telemarketing call and pretends it is from work so he can score points with his wife by telling her that he told them to stuff it.
- In "Dark Road", Vera phones Bethany to warn her about a suspect she is with. Standing close to to the suspect, Bethany starts giving innocuous sounding replies about the weather and other trivialities.
- Playing Sick: The Victim of the Week in "Tender," pretends to have cancer to get love and attention off a well meaning coffee shop owner, who lets her move in with her. Later on it is revealed that the victim's sister had cancer, and subsequently died of the disease when she was a teenager. Due to her sister's illness taking up her parent's attention, the victim felt unloved and ignored, started to act out, left the family home, and then decided to fake having the illness herself to get the attention she felt that she had missed out on while her sister was still alive, even going as far to fake hospital appointment letters and visits.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: In "A Certain Samaritan", Kenny is pounding on the door of one of his informants. A voice inside demands to know who it is and Kenny replies "It's Boris Karloff!". The informant's teenage son opens the door with a confused look on his face and asks "Who?".
- Protagonist Title: Vera is the main character, after all.
- Pursued Protagonist: "Little Lazarus" opens with a young boy fleeing cross-country from the murderer that just killed his mother.
- Put on a Bus:
- DS Joe Ashworth, along with his family.
- DC Holly Lawson.
- DC Rebecca "Shep" Shepherd.
- DC Hachim Cherradi.
- Dr Billy Cartwright.
- Dr Marcus Summer.
- Dr Malcolm Donahue.
- DS Aiden Healy
- DC Jac Williams
- Rage Breaking Point: Happens in "Death of a Family Man," "Natural Selection," "Dark Angel," "As The Crow Flies," “The Way the Wind Blows,” and "Tender," when the victims are killed by someone who lost their temper with them, either because of a heated argument or because of their callousness and lack of empathy over something the killer has found distressing.
- Ransacked Room: In "Vital Signs", Aiden goes to the flat of a suspect who had not turned up to work that day, but finds the flat empty and ransacked.
- Red Shirt: Narrowly averted by Billy, the naïve desk sergeant who is on secondment in "The Rising Tide."
- A Real Man Is a Killer: Part of the killer's motivation in "Cuckoo". Tired of being 'the estate kid that everyone picks on', he allows himself to be bullied into murdering his brother: thinking a reputation as a killer would bring him fear and respect. Vera points out the insanity of this when she arrests him.
- Retirony: The Victim of the Week in "Blood and Bone" is a police officer who is found dead on the day he was suppose to retire.
- Revisiting the Cold Case:
- "Telling Tales" opens with a convicted murderer who is ten years into a life sentence committing suicide. The publicity brings to light an alibi that had been ignored by the original investigators which proved her innocence. Vera and her team have to re-investigate the original murder.
- This led to the death of the Victim of the Week, a trainee criminal psychologist, in “Blind Spot” when she decides to try and reinvestigate a case involving one of the prisoners she was helping.
- Robbing the Dead:
- In "Tuesday's Child", one of the teens who discovers the Body of the Week steals the victim's wallet and mobile phone; severely delaying the identification of the body and the investigation.
- The Park Warden who found the Victim of the Week in “Blue” decided to pinch his wallet and phone off his body and then tried to use the stolen debit card to feed her gambling addiction.
- Roguish Poacher: The Victim of the Week in "The Deer Hunters" is suspected of being this. The truth is more complicated, but he certainly wasn't an Evil Poacher.
- Runaway Groom: In "Muddy Waters", the Victim of the Week called off his wedding a couple of days before the ceremony and then disappeared.
- Running Away to Cry: In "Telling Tales", Holly runs into the bathroom to cry after receiving a bollocking from Vera.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After another humiliation in front of (and by) the team, Holly puts in for a transfer. Partly subverted in that she had prepared the application a couple of weeks before, wanting to be closer to family, but her treatment by Vera was the tipping point.
- Self-Harm: The Victim of the Week in "Dirty," was deliberately scratching himself with a wire brush, and then putting bleach into the wounds. It appears he was doing this to try and numb the pain of seeing one of his childhood friends kill another one of his childhood friend's by pushing them off a crag, and then claiming that they had committed suicide.
- Secret Other Family:
- The Victim of the Week in "Death of a Family Man" is revealed to be living this kind of double-life.
- There's a variation of this on "Home." The Victim of the Week tells her husband, children, and everyone else she knows that she is an orphan with no other family, and grew up in a care home. Once Vera and the team start to investigate her death, however, it turns out that her father and brother are very much alive, and she had walked out on them years ago, disowning them in the process.
- Another variation happens in "Broken Promise." The Victim of the Week actually invents a whole family that doesn't exist, and even changes his name by deed poll in an attempt to distance himself from his own father who had killed another child in a hit-and-run while the Victim of the Week was in the car with him when he was younger.
- Sexy Soaked Shirt: Happens to Joe in "Silent Voices" when he dives into a reservoir fully-clothed to save a woman Trapped in a Sinking Car. His shirt is noticeably clingy and see-through when he emerges.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: One of the soldiers from "Sandancers," was suffering from PTSD after doing a tour of Duty in Afghanistan where he had watched one of his friends being blown up. After trying to confess to a murder that he didn’t commit, and then pushing Vera to the floor and holding her down there after some building work outside gives him flashbacks to Afghanistan in the interview room, it’s little wonder that he ends up committing suicide. However the Victim of the Week was also killed in the same way leaving Vera to then wonder whether she has two murders to investigate.
- The Show of the Books: The show is based upon the Vera Stanhope books by Ann Cleeves. Most of the episodes feature original stories credited as "Based on the characters created by Ann Cleeves", as there are far more episodes than books. However, with the exception of The Glass Room, all the novels have been adapted for the show, with the adaptation of Hidden Depths serving as the pilot episode.
- Sibling Murder:
- The killer in "Death of a Family Man," who killed his brother after an massive argument.
- The killer in "Prodigal Son," who murdered her own brother, who was blackmailing both her and her fiancée.
- The killer in "Dark Angel," who killed his half-brother after a violent argument about another crime they were both involved in.
- The killer in "Cuckoo," who killed his own brother due to divided loyalties with the drug gang he was in.
- The murderer in “Blue,” who killed his own brother after he thought he was going to get their father arrested.
- Shovel Strike: The Victim of the Week in "Telling Tales" is done in by a blow to the head with a shovel.
- Skinny Dipping: The Victim of the Week in "Changing Tides" was skinny dipping at a stag party before she was murdered.
- Staircase Tumble: The murderer shoves Joe down a flight of stairs when he discovers the prisoner in the cellar in "The Crow Trap."
- Start to Corpse: Combined with Cold Opening, the body of the Victim of the Week is usually discovered by the time the opening credits kick in - roughly about five minutes into the start of the episode.
- Starts with Their Funeral: The first episode opens with Vera and Joe scattering Vera's father's ashes.
- Stealing from the Till: The Business manager of the Victim of the Week in "Cold River" was embezzling funds from her beauty empire.
- Strictly Formula: One of the complaints that critics have about Vera is that the story just seems to go from plot point to plot point until the murderer is revealed, however the public don’t seem to care about this, because Vera is one of the most watched shows on ITV.
- Suddenly Shouting: In "Dark Road", Vera, grieving over Bethany's death and utterly furious with the suspect's Affably Evil act and denials, stands up and outright yells at him.Don't even TRY to act like this is tit-for-tat! You shot an unarmed woman in the back! We know the kind of man you are!
- Sympathetic Murderer: Quite a few...at least from the point of view of the audience and several members of Vera's team. Vera herself, however, does not hold with this trope and gives no quarter to murderers with understandable motives — they killed someone, and that's an automatic
Moral Event Horizon for Vera. Best seen in "Old Wounds", where she delivers a particularly vicious parting shot to a murderer who had lost his daughter and subsequently killed the person he thought was responsible, after he thanks her for letting him say goodbye to his daughter with some dignity: "You know where you can stick your thank-you." - Take This Job and Shove It: Holly hands in a transfer request in front of the team immediately after being berated one too many times by Vera. Played with in that she had prepared it weeks earlier, but that was the moment to hand it over with maximum impact.
- Talking Down the Suicidal:
- At the end of "Darkwater", Vera has to do this with the killer, who is planning to throw themselves off an escarpment over guilt for their actions. Vera succeeds, but the killer now finds they are frozen with fear and Vera has to physically drag them back from the edge.
- She also does this in "Castles in the Air" when the murderer threatens to only throw herself off the top of her house, but also take her children with her.
- And again in "Changing Tides," when the brother of the Victim of the Week threatens to throw himself off the wall of a ruined castle into the sea below.
- Tampering with Food and Drink: In "Young Gods", the killer spikes the Victim of the Week's drink with atropine. They try the same thing on a second victim, and it nearly does in him and Vera, who was sharing a drink with him. They survive because Joe is with them and calls for an ambulance.
- Teacher/Student Romance: A seemingly reciprocal (although short-lived) teacher/student features in "Muddy Waters". Years later, the student discovered that the teacher's child was actually his son and tried to connect with the boy. Although Vera and her team investigate this angle, it ultimately turned out to be only tangently related to his murder.
- Theme Serial Killer:
- The killer in "Hidden Depths," who would kill their victims, then lay them in water surrounded with wild flowers.
- An unintentional one in "Silent Voices." Both victims are first knocked unconscious by a rock, and then drowned. However, as Marcus points out, it's not because it's the murderer's signature MO, but more because they knew it worked the first time, so they stuck to what they knew for the second time.
- Think Nothing of It: Vera's attitude to accolades: in "Blue" she's up to be awarded a service medal, crumples up the letter about it and doesn't tell anyone, then when Aiden happens to read the letter and presses her about not accepting it she tells him she's just doing her job, no matter how good she is at it. She's true to her word and doesn't turn up to the awards ceremony, opting to see a domestic violence victim and her son off instead.
- Time-Delayed Death:
- In "On Harbour Street", a woman is stabbed on a train station platform with a thin, sharp blade. Subcutaneous fat seals the wound, and the woman boards the train without noticing. She dies on the train from internal bleeding, and the police are left with the mystery of a woman who was seemingly stabbed in the back while seated with her back to the carriage wall.
- In "A Certain Samaritan," it took the the Victim of the Week a couple of hours to die from his injuries after being in a fight, and then falling onto a truck’s roof.
- Also happens in "Dirty," when the Victim of the Week dies from a head injury he sustained in a fight several hours earlier.
- In "Witness" it turns out the Victim of the Week was killed because they had done this to the murderer's fiancee by jumping on his head after they had stood up to the victim in a restaurant a few years prior. The fiancee died of an aneurysm a few days later.
- The Victim of the Week in "Recovery," died from exposure after failing unconscious from injuries they got after being attacked earlier that day.
- In "Tyger Tyger," the first Victim of the Week is mowed down by a HGV when trying to get a colleague out of it’s path and is taken to hospital with severe head injuries. He finally dies a couple of days later from a post operative stroke he suffers during an operation to try and relieve some of the pressure in his brain caused by the accident.
- The Victim of the Week in "Tender," dies sometime after sustaining a whiplash injury during an argument. The injury then causes a blot clot in her neck that then stops blood getting to her brain.
- Trapped by Gambling Debts: In "Home", the brother-in-law of the Victim of the Week is deep in debt to a local gang boss who is currently in prison. His brother, the victim's husband, is a prison officer who is offered the chance to clear the debt by acting as a mule and smuggling contraband into the prison.
- Trapped in a Sinking Car: In "Silent Voices", the murderer attempts to dispose of his final victim by placing her in a car and rolling it off a cliff into a reservoir. Joe has to dive in to save her.
- Two Dun It: The murderer’s in "The Escape Turn."
- Two-Faced: In "Little Lazarus", Vera arrests a psycho who has been terrifying a woman and her son for years. Half of his face is covered in horrific burn scars (which were caused by the Victim of the Week), leading to the boy's nickname for him of 'the Shiny Man'. He turns out to be the murderer after being tipped off by a judge as to their whereabouts.
- Unconfessed Unemployment: In "Changing Tides", Vera and Aiden discover that one suspect had lost her job as a carer in an aged care home because she lied about her qualifications eight months earlier, but has not told her family.
- Unequal Pairing: This indirectly leads to the death of the Victim of the Week in "Home." The Victim Of The Week, Alison Glenn was trying to deal with her Abusive Dad, a brother with a learning disability, and a mother who has just abandoned them, when a newly qualified Social Worker takes on their case and visits. They end up having an affair (with the suggestion that the Social Worker took advantage of his position to have the relationship, since he was older, and was meant to be helping the family with it’s problems), and nine months later, Alison gives birth to a baby girl. Her Father gives the baby away to the Social Worker and his Wife, who raise the baby as their own. The Father's actions alienate Alison, who walks out on her brother and him, and disowns them. Years later, the now grown up baby discovers that Alison is her real mother, and ends up killing her when Alison rejects her.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In "Poster Child", the photographer who took an award-winning picture of the titular child returns to the neighbourhood in Baghdad where it happened and runs into a man who asks him about her. He promptly tells the man everything he knows, including her new name after she was adopted and that she now lives in England, causing the man to start looking for her because he's in fact her brother, ultimately resulting in the death of her adoptive father, a police officer, and ultimately himself.
- Uriah Gambit: The Victim of the Week in "Sandancers" is revealed to have pulled this in Afghanistan. Learning one of his subordinates was having an affair with his wife, he sent the soldier into a supposedly cleared building to pronounce the all-clear, knowing that there was still an IED inside. The bomb went off, killing the soldier.
- Vehicle-Roof Body Disposal: The accidental version happens in "A Certain Samaritan". After being stabbed, the Victim of the Week staggers against the railing of the overpass. The killer pushes him over and he lands on top of a passing long-distance lorry, where he breaks his spine. The lorry carries him all the way across the country (from Newcastle to Portsmouth), with them dying somewhere along the route.
- Vengeful Vending Machine: In "Home", Vera wins the trust of the young son of the Victim of the Week when the vending machine at the hospital doesn't give him his chocolate, and she hits the machine in the right way to jar the chocolate loose.
- Verbal Tic: Vera has the habit of addressing everyone as 'pet' or 'love'.
- Victim of the Week: Just look at all the other examples that namedrop this very trope.
- Window Pain: In "Broken Promise", the father of the Victim of the Week gets a rock thrown through his window with a note tied to it that reads "YOUR BOY'S DEAD HA HA".
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: In "Blood Will Tell", the business partner of the Victim of the Week torches their garage for the insurance. To make this look like a criminal attack rather than Insurance Fraud, he has his son beat him up.
- Yandere: The killer in “The Darkest Evening,” who came across as mild mannered but was dangerously psychopathic underneath. He not only murdered his lover, who was also the mother of his child, he also killed a friendly neighbour of her’s who had been helping her out (he also happened to be her ex teacher), and then tried to claim he had brought his murder on himself. He was also very emotionally abusive to his children.
- You Do Not Have to Say Anything: Said frequently by all the Detectives in the show when arresting someone.
- You Just Told Me: In "Dark Road", Vera confronts a suspect and asks him why his thumbprint was found on a broken glass at the crime scene. After he admits being there, he asks how they knew it was his thumbprint, Vera replies:I didn't, pet, till just now.
