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Ann Cleeves introduced us to Detective Matthew Venn in The Long Call (2019). Police officers in crime fiction are ten-a-penny, so writers strive to make their creations a bit different, or to have what marketing people call a USP. Venn is married to a creative arts chap called Jonathan. This is, to say the least, an unusual circumstance in the rugged North Devon fishing village of Greystone, where he goes to investigate the mysterious death of a media-savvy – and much televised –  adventurer and sailor called Jem Rosco. Venn is, however, no stranger to Greystone. It is where he was brought up as a member of an exclusive group of evangelical Christians called The Barum Brethren.

Rosco has turned up in Greystone, more or less out of nowhere, although the villagers have seen him often enough on their TV screens. After a few weeks of holding court in the village pub – The Maiden’s Prayer –  Rosco disappears, but is then found dead in a little boat anchored just off-shore, in a violent storm. The local RNLI bring his body back, and then his demise becomes a case for Matthew Venn, based in Barnstaple, the largest town in the area.

This is certainly not one of those ‘murder comes to seaside idyll’ stories. Greystone is a grim little village which is frequently battered by the weather. For Its residents life is something of a struggle; there are few amenities, and employment is hard to come by. With all the skill she displays in her other  novels set by the sea, Ann Cleeves allows the village to develop a rather forbidding character all of its own.

There are several well-drawn local characters, all of whom Venn is forced to consider as he tries to answer the age old question about a mysterious death – “Cui Bono?“. Pub landlord Harry Carter may be every bit of the jovial ‘mine host’ he appears to be, but do shady financial dealings in his past bring him into the web of suspects? Mary Ford is the first woman to be skipper of the local lifeboat, but her life is shot through with anxiety over the future of her son who suffers from a degenerative disease. As a teenager, she had an unrequited passion for Jem Rosco, so has his re-emergence in the village triggered an act of revenge for past slights? Barty Lawson, alcoholic Commodore of the nearby Morrisham Yacht Club,  has bitter memories of the days when Rosco – irreverent, mocking and disrespectful – used his celebrity to belittle him. The hint of an old romance between Rosco and Lawson’s wife Eleanor has further soured the man’s mind but, in a rare sober moment, was he capable of engineering the complex piece of theatre which appears to have framed the discovery of the sailor’s body?

When Lawson’s body is later found shattered at the foot of a towering cliff, Venn wonders if this was the final act of a guilty man, but Ann Cleeve provides a solution to the mystery that is much more elegant – and unexpected.  The Raging Storm is, on one level, a standard whodunnit, and sticks to the standard framework of a police procedural novel, but it is shot through with subtle characterisations, clever plot twists and an abiding sense of deep unease. Published by MacMillan, the book is available now.