Cleeves’ seaside whodunit a stormy treat

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This article was published 28/10/2023 (685 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Telly adventure star Jem Rosco is quite the Jack-the-lad, charming the girls and young women and even occasionally a rich elderly woman in between sailing solo round the world with only a TV camera for company.

So why then is Jem so low-key when he comes back home to north Devon, renting the last cottage along the cliffs of the bleakest seaside village on the coast, where he gets up to we know not what until — brace yourself — he ends up naked, stabbed to death and floating in a dinghy in a cove feared by superstitious locals?

Oh dear.

It’s quite the challenge for detective inspector Matthew Venn — the recently returned local lad who has his own memories of this seaside village — and his sleuthing police sidekicks Jen and Ross.

Any chance there’ll be a second body eventually?

Oh, please.

This is the third murder mystery featuring Venn and it’s a right crackerjack tale from the brilliantly devilish mind of Ann Cleeves, creator of the magnificent Vera and Shetland series.

Venn remembers the village well — it’s where his parents came on seaside holidays of dubious pleasure along with fellow members of the Barum Brethren, the area religious cult to which Venn’s family belonged.

Belonged, that is, until teenaged Matthew let it be known he didn’t believe a word of it and was promptly shunned and shown the door, his parents choosing to watch him go.

You surely didn’t see this one coming: many of the assorted suspects and witnesses are Brethren.

Now he’s back, and married to Jonathan, director of the area arts centre, their love definitely not approved of in the parts of the holy book the Barum Brethren choose to follow.

Meanwhile, it seems Jem is not all that fondly remembered by the locals who gather over their pints at The Maiden’s Prayer, the pub where Jem dropped by after his quiet return. He was a manipulative little braggart, blowhard and bully back in the day.

Jem had let it be known the fair Eleanor was the love of his life — though her thoughts on the matter may not have matched his — and that he’d sail home some day to reclaim her hand, her wishes notwithstanding. This doesn’t sit all that well with Eleanor’s landed gentry husband, a magistrate, commodore at the yacht club and very nasty, constantly drunken lout.

The night Rosco was killed, a night owl spotted a mysterious woman — well, she would be mysterious in a murder mystery, wouldn’t she? — appearing at the end of the narrow lane at the end of which sat Jem’s rental. It would be outright silly to wonder if she had anything to do with the murder, no?

Venn, meanwhile, wonders why no one’s ever asked where Jem got the money to buy the boat on which he sailed around the world solo, making his fame and fortune on the cable channels.

Venn isn’t the easiest character to get to know, though we should expect by now that Cleeves isn’t going to write a straightforward open and well-adjusted chap.

He’s brooding and introspective, and disappears inside himself just when his crew hopes he’ll share his suspicions about villains.

Matthew Venn is a decent human being and nifty detective tasked with finding the vilest among us and Cleeves has given him yet another fascinating case to solve. Put on your wellies, a heavy jumper, a rain slicker and a waterproof hat — it’s cold and rainy on the foreboding Devon coast, but so well worth the visit.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin reckons his Devon-born P.E.I. grandfather would never have gone near the Barum Brethren, but The Maiden’s Prayer, that would be another story.