Gwen Moffat lives in Cumbria. Her novels are set in remote communities ranging from the Hebrides to the American West. The crimes fit their environment, swelling that dreadful record of sin in the smiling countryside cited by Sherlock Holmes.
Exams over, besties Lottie and Hannah drove down to Devon on Friday so that they could take in the music festival and enjoy the weekend in the Armstrongs’ luxurious holiday home before the parents came to put a brake on the fun. But when the family did arrive on the Monday morning it was to find Lottie drowned in the pool, and Hannah, their own daughter, missing.
Consternation. Paul Armstrong was a junior minister, a doctor and TV pundit: a target for the media – and for criminals. Had this been a bungled kidnapping? There were rumours of conspiracy, of terrorism. MI5 was consulted. Then Hannah was discovered close to the pool, bludgeoned to death.
The man put in charge of the case was DI Matthew Venn, a troubled introvert devoted to his more stable husband. Interludes of cool domestic bliss provided welcome relief to the tedium of an investigation conducted in a stifling heat wave when everyone else was on holiday, or in the business of servicing them. Initially Venn concentrated on the local element, conveniently contained by the Armstrongs’ house, the farm and the pub, and all connected by relationships of varying intensity.
Jake from the farm had been Hannah’s lover, a liaison seemingly condoned by their mothers: strong women married to unworthy men: an ambitious politician and an ageing hippy. A third woman, another mother hen - but this one childless - looked after the pub and the staff of surfers and students while her husband, a gourmet chef, dreamed of a gastro pub and a star, and consorted with questionable “suits” after hours.
There were incomers too. The festival had been held at the farm and one meadow was a camp site with glamping units. One of the pods was occupied by an American couple, the husband said to be writing a book featuring Paul Armstrong.
Lottie’s mother arrived, a glamorous London business woman whose divorced husband made movies in Hollywood and was too busy to fly back but would try to make the funeral.
We are presented with these characters without bias, all emotion is between themselves; we, like Venn, are supposedly neutral: investigators alert for clues. And from the very first page clues are dropped so unobtrusively that they can be easily missed. The result is a construction like a textbook exercise, an example of how to write a crime novel, you can only admire the dove-tailing. So whose is the small voice asking what happened to the Emperor’s clothes?
The answer is that the murders are incidental and every clever clue is set to frame a contrivance. And there’s the rub. Cleeves is a seasoned technician and entertainer but she doesn’t do violence. If there is something of the ghoul in crime writers she missed out on that debatable essence.
