THE DYING LIGHT , ANN CLEEVES' Matthew Venn/Two Rivers series #4

THE DYING LIGHT (Two Rivers #4)
ANN CLEEVES
Minotaur Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Dying Light is a searing new novel featuring DI Matthew Venn, brimming with energy and taut with claustrophobic tension, as the detective peels back layer upon layer to discover the dark secrets this family is keeping.

A scorching heatwave marks the start of the summer in Devon. Detective Matthew Venn is called in to investigate a puzzling death, when the body of a young woman, Lottie, is found in the swimming pool of a luxurious holiday home. The girl’s best friend, Hannah, whose family owns the house, is missing. The girls had arrived in Devon a few days ahead of the family to celebrate the end of their school exams, and had managed to make waves during their short time there; they disrupted the folk music festival at the neighboring farm, with Lottie posting incendiary videos on social media mocking what she snobbishly considered to be a parochial community.

When further tragedy strikes, Venn and his team begin questioning a community filled with secrets. Hannah’s father, Paul Armstrong, is a rising political star, a fact that quickly draws intense media scrutiny to the case, not least because there are many who would want to take him down. With the summer heat come holidaymakers, and it emerges that some of them may have more connections with the Armstrong family than first thought.

Caught between a powerful family's secrets and a powder keg of local tensions, Venn and his team must navigate a treacherous path. He knows all too well that the real answers lie not in what people say, but in the silence that they keep . . .

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Mean girl goes after easy target, makes already angry people angrier, gets killed.

Another case where Matthew ought to clost the case with "person or persons unknown" and stamp a seal on it. Who cares if this nasty little pisher Lottie's dead? Let's take the gene-pool cleanse as a piece of luck and get on with solving terrible crimes.

Hannah, Lottie's buddy and the daughter of the man whose home Lottie was staying in, is missing. He also happens to be a big-shot political scum. Hop to, Matthew and scoobygroup...I mean, team. The locals whose police dollars are funding this investigation already resent Hannah's outsider family for "ruining" (ie moving into and making more expensive) their community. Like all resort-ifying communities the battle lines are sharply drawn. The problem for Jen, who took the initial report regarding Lottie who's her son Ben's age, and Ross who's still irked at not being seen as the genius he isn't, and Matthew himself (in the throes of a serious upheaval in Jonathan's life), is how to tiptoe down a superthin line between the sides while still extracting information that will allow Hannah, the missing young woman, to be found alive?

Oh dear.

More and more complexities and interconnections...Hannah's local boyfriend,the dead girls' mutual from the US, whose unfriendly parents are staying at the local boyfriend's parents' glamping resort...yes, it's all a bit much in a short review but honestly it's paced with Author Cleeves' usual skill and attention to misdireaction...I mean detail, of course I do. Quite a bit of time is, annoyingnly, going over what feels the precise same detail with the same people. Look closer.

Jonathan loves Matthew or he wouldn't have married him. Right now, though, Jonathan is a wreck because he's set up a meeting with his birth mother. Tis will sress any marriage...and it's not been *that* long that Matthew's religious-nut mother was widowed and thus could at least start to rebuild bridges with her queer son; so as always, like life, the stressors are not neatly sequential.

Series fans will be delighted that Lucy and her dad make an appearance.

That's as always the series mystery's greatest appeal for readers. The puzzles are nice but the people who stay, who come back, who thread through the series make the weather. Sunny and fair here in North Devon (which is how you know it's fiction), among interesting, relatable regulars and starkly weird contrasting outsiders. Don't start here, start with The Long Call. (And write nastygrams to ITV/Britbox for canceling the TV adaptation.)