The Dying Light: Forthcoming Ann Cleeves

With thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan for this preview.

The Dying Light, the new Matthew Venn mystery, will be out in early October in Canada and the U.S. A couple of weeks ago Ann Cleeves, Shetland Noir’s patron, appeared at a fun crime fiction festival that’s on my bucket list.

Cleeves was discussing her two decades of publishing Jimmy Perez novels; her Vera series started just over a quarter of a century ago.

But well before that, Cleeves was a hardworking crime novelist. I’ve been catching up on some of her earlier work, and it’s fascinating to see how her style evolved. Much like Val McDermid, she wrote brisker and less psychologically-oriented stories earlier in her career, yet some of her key themes are present from early on: an insistence on giving the dead dignity and ensuring that justice is done in the context of investigations conducted by very imperfect and sometimes idiosyncratic people who are dealing with their own domestic and personal challenges.

Matthew Venn is Cleeves’s most recent creation, a gay police investigator who lives and works in North Devon. His husband runs a local arts centre.

Venn has strayed from the path that his rigidly devout family imagined for him when he was growing up as part of the Brethren sect. He’s been cast out for his loss of faith. That has fostered a fundamental insecurity in Matthew that is analogous to Vera’s own sense of always being socially marginalized due to her own peculiar upbringing and her lack of social graces. Both thrive at work and in the role of boss; but Matthew has also managed to navigate a loving relationship, and in this novel his husband’s discover of his biological mother is viewed by Matthew as a potential threat to the couple’s happiness.

This is my favourite of the Matthew Venn books to date, although all of them have been very strong. The sense of place is wonderfully realized, as always in Cleeves’s novels. And the underlying story is tense and carefully paced.

Two young women, close friends at their private secondary school in London, have recently completed their A levels. They’ve elicited permission to drive up on their own to the vacation home of one of the girls’ parents, with the rest of the family to join them a couple of days later.

The friend is found dead in the swimming pool when the parents and their two much younger sons arrive at the home in the early morning.

After a frantic search, their own daughter is also located.

From the beginning of the investigation, we learn that all of the parents involved are concealing as much as they reveal.

The father is a potential cabinet minister in the government, a savvy and charismatic man whose wife appears content to support his career while raising their children largely on her own. Their seventeen-year-old daughter Hannah was quiet and anxious; she had changed schools after a bullying incident. At her new school, she had become friends with Lottie, the daughter of a glossy single-mother agent who manages her feelings about marital abandonment with alcohol.

Lottie is gorgeous and intelligent, and she was due to start at Oxford in the fall. Her large social media fandom is devastated by the news of her death. But she also had a cruel streak that the police suspect may have prompted her murder, with Hannah as a potential witness who needed to be silenced.

Suspects abound, and Cleeves has a gift for incorporating interview scenes with witnesses and potential culprits that don’t feel rote or repetitive.

And as always, the place is significant: North Devon’s grassy fields and farms, remote beaches and popular tourist locales are carefully conjured up, and there’s a sharp contrast to the bustle of London, when Matthew takes the train up to the city for a day of investigating.

Cleeves writes heartbreaking stories, and in this one, the line between innocence and guilt blurs considerably for most of the major characters. An accomplished addition to the Matthew Venn series.