The Raging Storm, the third novel in Ann Cleeves's Detective Matthew Venn series, once again finds Venn and his team working to identify a killer in a community with which Venn is uncomfortably familiar. Venn may have been a very young man when he was tossed out of his mother's closed and cultish church, but the memories and scars from that experience are still fresh ones.
When Jem Rosco, a national celebrity sailor/adventurer is murdered and his body left in a small, securely anchored dinghy off of Sully Cove, Venn and his team are assigned the investigation. The community had been pleasantly surprised when Rosco came home to rent a place and hang out most evenings in the pub with the locals, but their pleasure and pride turned into shock after they learned exactly how the man had been killed.
Jem Rosco had lifetime ties to the village of Greystone, as does his killer - but so does Detective Matthew Venn...and that's going to be a problem.
"Since losing his faith, and marrying Jonathan, he hadn't been back. As they approached, he felt a little embarrassed by the boy he'd been, but interested to visit again a place where he'd been so happy."
...
"A community that policed itself sounded dangerous to him, with an undercurrent of control, bullying. The Brethren had never liked outsiders looking into their business, and perhaps he was wary because of his experience with them. He wondered how many of the younger villagers were still members."
Venn is in charge of a murder investigation in which his personal judgement is clouded by his past and what he experienced during his childhood visits to Greystone. Venn begins to wonder how easily he can be duped and mislead by suspects with which he has so much in common, and before this one is over he will be tested in ways he cannot yet imagine.
The Raging Storm is the Matthew Venn novel in which I really began to understand Matthew Venn, a man so deeply scarred by his childhood that even as an adult he has difficulty tempering his cold, suspicious nature long enough to acquire even the most superficial of friends. When it comes to close friends (other than his husband, Jonathan), forget it. That's not going to happen. My familiarity with its main characters made The Raging Storm much easier to connect to for me than the first two series books had been. I anticipated a solid four-star rating for this one, in fact, right up until an ending style that has irked me before in an Ann Cleeves novel, one that is much more "tell" than it is "show." I don't enjoy endings where the chief investigator "recaps" for the rest of the team all the things that have happened offstage while I was scouring the book on my own for clues to the killer's identity. I have never enjoyed that kind of ending, and I never will. So, disappointedly, I'm giving The Raging Storm only three stars instead of four - and wondering just how anxious I'll be to read the next Ann Cleeves novel.
Disappointing endings can really ruin a book, can't they? I don't like when authors do a big info dump at the end to wrap things up instead of showing it play out.
ReplyDeleteIt just seems like such a cheesy way out to me, Lark. It's a way of giving up without leaving the reader totally confused, but it always disappoints me and leaves me irritated and unsatisfied in the end.
DeleteFrustrating to end like this
ReplyDeleteAnd always disappointing when it happens.
DeleteEndings can be so annoying! I agree with you re tell vs. show but I guess I am sometimes grateful for the tell if I can't figure out what really happened!
ReplyDeleteI just finished a book where the primary female character suffered enormously the entire book but just when her life got back on track, she stabbed her neighbor with a knife. I felt the author just did it to be able to add another "twist" to many she had casually dropped in the narrative (I was also expecting that the stepfather had either molested her as a child or killed her father while she watched, so was surprised the author didn't throw those in too!).
I may have said this before but Matthew is so tortured it can be painful to read. I have only read the first two but liked them, although there was a dinner party for his mother than Jonathan slaved over and Matthew was pretty harsh to both of them, if I recall correctly.
Sometimes that kind of ending changes everything that happened in over 300 previous pages, and I end up with the feeling that the author isn't playing fair with the reader. It always seems unrealistic, too, that the chief investigator is only THEN sharing all he suspected with his crew of fellow investigators. Keeping them in the dark has prolonged the agony for all concerned. Too, I really get irritated when a "great reveal" comes out of nowhere and has to be explained and documented in a book's last 10 pages. It's not that I have to figure it all out for myself to enjoy a book - that seldom happens - but I do want a fair shot at it.
DeleteThat book you describe does sound as if its authors was playing unnecessary games with the reader. Thrillers that overdue it tread dangerously close to crossing the line that transforms a thriller into a farce.
Matthew is definitely a hard man to warm up to, not likable at all. But his upraising makes all of that forgivable, I suppose. His relationship with his mother is especially painful to read about. Jonathan must be some kind of saint.
Endings of books are very important to me too. If they disappoint me or just fizzle out in some way, it can ruin my enjoyment of the book.
ReplyDeleteTotally, Tracy. It's one of those choices that so many authors seem to be making these days, but it always ends up being the thing I remember the longest about the book...not a good thing at all. Just leaves me with a bad aftertaste.
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