Description
Ann Cleeves—New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of the Vera and Shetland series, both of which are hit TV shows—returns with The Raging Storm, the extraordinary third installment in the Matthew Venn series.
Fierce winds, dark secrets, deadly intentions.
When Jem Rosco—sailor, adventurer, and legend—blows into town in the middle of an autumn gale, the residents of Greystone, Devon, are delighted to have a celebrity in their midst. But just as abruptly as he arrived, Rosco disappears again, and soon his lifeless body is discovered in a dinghy, anchored off Scully Cove, a place with legends of its own.
This is an uncomfortable case for Detective Inspector Matthew Venn. Greystone is a place he visited as a child, a community he parted ways with. Superstition and rumor mix with fact as another body is found, and Venn finds his judgment clouded.
As the winds howl, and Venn and his team investigate, he realizes that no one, including himself, is safe from Scully Cove’s storm of dark secrets.
My Thoughts
Cleeves just keeps getting better with every story she writes. This new entry in the Matthew Venn series reveals a bit more information about Matthew’s upbringing in The Brethren, but really focuses on long simmering feuds, wrongs done in the past and the long, long memories of people in a small, isolated town.
The atmosphere here is one of the darkest I recall from a Cleeves book (although there are a couple in the Shetland series that get pretty dark), with the setting in a small Devon coastal village everyone describes as “bleak.” Cleeves excels at writing descriptive narrative so lush you can feel the rain on your face and the wind in your hair, and she certainly delivers that kind of experience here.
True to form, the characters here are memorable, from the charismatic Jem to devoted mother Mary, her protective father Alan, and the ultra-manipulative woman who fools them all.
This can be read as a stand-alone, but it will make you want to go back and read the others in the Venn series. While a well-constructed mystery in Cleeves’ incomparable style, be prepared for feeling less than cheerful while reading.
“A friend of mine once joked that the work of Ann Cleeves is the closest the crime fiction genre comes to evoking ASMR—the euphoric, pleasant, spine-tingling sensation that’s all the rage on YouTube.” —The New York Times
Publication Date: September 5, 2023
Published By: St. Martin’s Press, Minotaur Books
Thanks to Netgalley for the review copy
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