#TheRagingStorm #NetGalley This DI Matthew Venn series is turning into another excellent series from the very talented Ann Cleeves. Although the third in the series it is capable of being read as a standalone but it is interesting to know some of the back story of the main characters. Full of drama and suspense and lots of twists and turns that kept me guessing until near the end. I very much look forward to the next installment of this exciting series!

I’ve read the other books in the series and really enjoyed The Raging Storm. Many aspects of this book are similar to the rest of the series and police procedurals in general. Like other books by the author, this stands out because of the setting of the book which serves as the perfect backdrop for the murders and the fantastic characters. I’m growing to love Venn and his colleagues as much as I love Vera and her colleagues. Venn’s past as a member of the religious order, the Barum Brethren touches on events in this book as the crimes take place on a remote village he visited as a child and a member. I enjoyed the twists, turns and misdirection and the gradual revelation of the murderer.

It's all bloody peculiar, isn't it, Sir?

Well yes, it is. Jem Rosco blew into the local pub one evening in the middle of an autumn gale, stayed for about a month and then turned up, naked and dead, in a small boat, anchored in Scully Cove close to the village of Greystone, in Devon. Rosco had the status of a national treasure: a renowned adventurer, round the world sailor and all round celebrity. I nearly said 'all-round good egg' but as we'll find out, he could be more than a little bit close with money and his background isn't exactly an open book. Where did he get the money for his first boat? How did he finance the trip?

The main point, though, is 'who would want him dead?' This problem has dropped on the toes of DI Matthew Venn. Venn is married to Jonathan Church - and (unusually in fiction) it's a happy marriage. They genuinely care about making each other's lives better. Venn is still emerging from the effects of his childhood in the Barum Brethren from whom he was expelled as a teenager when he explained to the assembled Brethren how ridiculous their beliefs were. There will be positives and negatives arising from this in the present case. Many of the villagers are members of the church and some must remember him from his teenage years. It won't be easy for him to keep a clear view of what's happening.

Venn's in Greystone with DS Jen Rafferty and DS Ross May. May's calmed down from when we first met him but he's still overly competitive with Rafferty, whilst Rafferty's got other things on her mind. She's a scouser who's escaped an abusive relationship back in Liverpool and she's mainly concerned with seeing that her teenage children - Ben and Ella - don't suffer too much from the demands of her job. There's a good mixture of supporting staff and they all come off the page well but this is Ann Cleeves, so we expect no less.

In Greystone, the lifeboat helm is a woman (much mumbling of incantations particularly when they're heading into Scully Cove) and she has her problems with a seriously ill child. She can only make herself available for the lifeboat when her father can look after her son - but out on the boat is where she feels herself come alive.

As well as reading the copy made available to me by the publishers, I bought an audio download, narrated by Jack Holden. His pacing is perfect and he has an impressive range of voices. He says that the switch of accents between North Devon and Brummie was difficult - but I found the transitions seamless. He's a narrator I'd happily listen to time and time again.

Ann Cleeves is at her ingenious best with the latest DI Matthew Venn crime novel, The Raging Storm.

Local legend Jem Silver delights the residents of Greystone, Devon, by arriving in the middle of an autumn gale. Everyone in town is thrilled to have a local celebrity in their midst and nobody thinks much of it when the sailor and adventurer disappears again. Jem is not a man to be tied down so the fact that he’s left town is not a huge cause for concern – until his body is found in a dinghy anchored off Scully Cove during a raging storm.

DI Matthew Venn has been called in to investigate and this case promises to be an uncomfortable and challenging one for the detective. Matthew has ties with the remote village he had lived in as a child with his parents as part of the Barum Brethren. Matthew had eventually parted ways with the cult, but regardless of how hard he tries, shaking them off has been anything but easy. Superstition and gossip make for the most lethal of bedfellows and when another body is found, Matthew’s judgement looks set to become more and more clouded.

As stormy winds leave a trail of destruction in their wake, the whole village is cut off and Venn and his team are put in a terrifying situation where a killer has them firmly in their sights…

Crime writer extraordinaire Ann Cleeves has done it again with The Raging Storm. A writer who writes with great humanity and compassion, Ann Cleeves has penned a complex, eerie, unsettling and gripping crime thriller that is an absolute struggle to put down. The Raging Storm is a first-rate page-turner about dark undercurrents, powerful secrets and destructive lies guaranteed to keep readers engrossed and reading all through the night.

Ann Cleeves is a writer who is at the top of her game and with The Raging Storm she has another surefire bestseller on her hands her legion of fans are going to lap up.

Jem Roscoe was a bit of a local hero. Round the world sailor & a bit of a celebrity it was inevitable that his return to Greystone would cause a bit of a stir. He was staying in a holiday cottage & had been pretty vague as to why- beyond he was waiting for someone. When his naked body was found in a small boat in the midst of a gale DI Matthew Fenn & his team investigate. Matthew found returning to this part of Devon difficult. He had been brought up in a sect called the Brethren until he lost his faith & this has left him with a certain awkwardness & somewhat gloomy disposition that even his happy marriage to outgoing Jonathan has not quite managed dispel. Jem Roscoe may have had a charm & some fame, but he also had enemies & many were not too sad at his death. As the autumn gales rage the team try to unravel the mystery.

This is the third book in the series & I have enjoyed them all. The weather & the setting with this one were almost characters in their own right. Ann Cleeves isn't one for making it easy to work out whodunnit & as usual I didn't- but who cares? It was a great read. Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for letting me read & review this book. I hope it won't be too long till the next one.

Greystone is a small community, so when a local celebrity is found dead in a dinghy off Scully Cove, Matthew Venn and his team are sent to investigate.
This is a place that is slightly uncomfortable for Venn as it has ties to his childhood, it is town with dark secrets that want to be kept hidden. So when a second body is discovered things start to get out of control.
With a storm brewing and a killer on the loose and everyone a suspect. Scully Cove soon become a dangerous place to be for everyone including the police.
Ann Cleeves has produced another wonderful character with Matthew Venn.
He is as good as any of her other characters.
This story is fascinating, from start to finish it had me gripped.
This is the best book in the series so far. I very much recommend it.

A body is discovered in an anchored dinghy after a lifeboat call-out off Greystone village, North Devon. It turns out to be the newly-returned local sailing adventurer Jem Rosco who has been living in a rented cottage for the last month, awaiting a 'mystery visitor'.

DI Matthew Venn is assigned the task of solving the mystery, 3rd in the 'Two Rivers' series. His feisty companion, Scouser Jen Rafferty and the needy, competitive 'point-scorer' Ross May join him in the close knit, isolated community where everyone seems to have a link to everyone else. Greystone takes DI Matthew Venn back to childhood memories of the 'Brethren', the church sect his parents belonged to. Fierce storms, crashing sea, moody cloud and fog mean the detectives have to stay in the area, increasing the oppressive feeling.
Super, flowing read where you happily meet old friends (especially around the Community Centre - not in Greystone!); Ann Cleeves is a master of characters.

Venn pieces the stories of the locals and further afield,building up his theories only to have them collapse again. Plenty of clues, red herrings, menace, danger and false leads; keeps you guessing all the way.

I missed Jonathan in this book - he was there, briefly; however I feel the next instalment will suply this, judging by a detail at the end. I love how Ann Cleeves can make a book both homely with the characters you care for, while at the same time - full of threat, danger and oppression. Best so far of the series.

Venn comes face to face with his past in solving this case. The characters are , as always well formed and their backgrounds emerging to add detail to his colleagues. The path of the plot twists and turns until the unexpected denouement. A page turner of a who dunnit

"'The gale's caused damage all along the coast'.
'Perhaps we should go back to Barnstaple then.'...
'No chance of getting out now.' Harry grinned. He seemed to be enjoying their discomfort. Or he was someone else who liked a drama. 'The lines were brought down by an oak, which is blocking the road...'
Venn went to his to check the situation for himself. He couldn't imagine that they were really trapped here. Not in this day and age."

Book three of the Three Rivers / Detective Matthew Venn series, set in North Devon has a promising start, seeing Venn and his team isolated due to storms, in a rather unwelcoming and less 'touristy' part of the county. Investigating the staged death of a well-known, returning explorer and sailor, necessitates understanding the local characters, their pasts and their relationships. It also brings Venn back into contact with his uncomfortable, Barum Bretheran past, because of the strong community here, which may cloud his judgement.

With a strong sense of place and well-developed, returning (Venn's colleagues, Jen and Ross) and new characters is classic Cleeves. She is one of those authors whose never disappoints, whose plotting and pace is perfect, leaving the reading experience seemless and engrossing. The main focus is older characters, with more substantial and complex pasts and the theme of the sea and sea-farers (through the victim and the volunteer coastguard characters) runs throughout. Whilst I had an inkling who was responsible, as ever there were complexities I hadn't anticipated. It's an excellent, well-set police procedural, by a reliable and experienced author.

You could read this in isolation, because context is explained, but as with most series books they're better read in order. I've said this before, but I really need to work my way through the Vera and Shetland series.

Although I haven’t read the previous books in The Two Rivers series by Ann Cleeves, featuring DI Matthew Venn and his team, it didn’t prevent this third one from being straightforward to read as a standalone novel because of the comprehensive backstory information provided.

Greystone, where Jem Rosco, a local boy cum celebrity, is discovered dead in a dinghy anchored off Scully Cove, is as grim and formidable a place as it sounds. The rough and rugged Devon coastline, and the raging storm that fells a tree which keeps the team stranded and without electricity, becomes a character by itself.

The oppressive atmosphere soaks through this book. An air of secrecy, resentment, gloom and despondency hangs over Greystone and increases as the story develops. Mathew Venn, alongside his disparate colleagues, Ross and Jenn, seek to make sense of it all.

For DI Venn, it’s an unwelcome return to his childhood home. It stirs up unpleasant memories and creates fresh association with the strict Barum Brethren he thought he was free from. Jenn yearns to get back to her family, and Ross also chafes at being marooned in Greystone longer than anticipated.

Yet another murder occurs and the team reluctantly find themselves having to spend longer in gloomy Greystone than they want, at least until the raging storm abates and they can solve the murders. This ends up putting them at greater personal risk as well.

It’s an intriguing, cleverly crafted crime novel that I enjoyed on the whole. Perhaps it was the bleak setting, or not warming so much to DI Matthew Venn as I have to the wittier and far more likeable DI Vera Stanhope, but it didn’t quite hit the spot for me. Grateful thanks to Pan MacMillan and NetGalley for the ARC. — 3.5**

Matthew Venn and his team are back. He is one of several well created characters. In a small seaside village where everyone knows each other, it can be hard to tell the truth from the lies. This book starts with one mother but there is another to come. Some lines in the story are also traced back to their shared childhood, in particular the famous Roscoe known for sailing round the world. This story grabs a reader immediately and steers you through the intricacies of the relationships. It ends very satisfactorily. It is a really good read and I recommend it.

This is book three of the Two Rivers series of books and, as per usual, you will get the best out of it if you start from the beginning and read in order. If for nothing else than character backstory and development.
We start with the return of an old face. Jem Roscoe, famous sailing adventurer, blows back into Greystone, the town he grew up in, and is welcomed back into the fold. He visits the pub every night and appears to have fitted back in well. He hints at the reason for his return but never tells the whole story. And then, just as quickly as he arrived, he is gone again.
And then, after a call to the authorities reporting an abandoned boat, his lifeless body is discovered in a dinghy anchored just off Scully Cove... Enter DI Matthew Venn and his team to investigate...
Venn is wary of returning to Greystone, as it is here that the community he used to be a part of is centred. But he has to put his feelings aside and crack on, especially when there's another body...
And so begins an intriguing case for Venn to try and get to the bottom of as he, Jen and Ross have to go back and delve into Jem's past. To his childhood, to when he first learned to sail. To his friends and associates, to try and make sense of what has happened to him and who could be responsible.
The team are chalk and cheese and something else that goes with neither, but they rub along well and their differences actually assist their investigative procedure. Especially important given that Venn is a tad distracted by his own past. But he has Jonathan to help him, although he has his own issues in this book. There really is a lot going on outwith the main plot but nothing that overshadows it.
As always, the characters drive the narrative. And I am including the setting in this as it is so integral to the plot that it could almost be a character in its own right. It definitely lends a feeling of darkness and despair to the whole. Plotting is tight and, as always, well executed with the pacing matching the narrative all the way through.
All in all, another worthy addition to another one of this author's cracking series. My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

Thank you for the chance to read this ARC in return for my honest opinion.

I have read Ann Cleeves books before and have found the Matthew Venn series not as compelling as the Vera and Shetland books.
This book was very slow and confusing. The motive for the murder seemed very ‘forced’ to me and didn’t seem believable.
I also found the references to the ‘cult’ and Venn’s previous life unnecessary and didn’t fit well into the storyline.
Somehow Venns sexuality seemed to be over reinforced when this wasn’t necessary.

This felt like a book of two disconnected parts to me

Thank you again for the chance to read this

Detective Matthew Venn is back and is called in to solve the murder of Jem Rosco, the local celebrity.
Its back to the village that Matthew grew up in and its uncomfortable for him.
Who did it and why? and who can be trusted?

Thank you to NetGalley and Pan for my copy of The Raging Storm by Ann Cleeves.
This is the second book about Detective Matthew Venn set in Devon.
It did take a little longer for me to get into this book but once I did I enjoyed it.
This book takes Matthew back to his childhood growing up as a member of a strict religious group the Barum Brethren
With most of the inhabitants in this small village also belonging to this church it is very hard to get people to talk to outsiders.
A very good read.

The Matthew Venn/Two Rivers series is now three novels in and although I’m up to date this, inexplicably, remains the only Ann Cleeves series I’ve read and I don’t feel that bad about it because it means I have still so many books of hers to enjoy.
Fans of this series, which has been consistently strong from the start, will be delighted with this because it’s the best one yet. We’re on location here as the team tackle a case in the fictional, somewhat bleak, North Devon village of Greystone, making the emphasis more rooted in police procedural than the other two books. The team of Detective Matthew Venn, Jen Rafferty and Ross May face what Venn describes as the strangest he’d ever investigated, when a celebrity revisiting the area he’d grown up in ends up dead at sea. A storm rages, confining the team to the village, where the community largely police themselves and “where many people were related and everyone knew their neighbours, no effort at friendliness was needed and grudges grew unheeded.”
The claustrophobia of the area is conveyed well. Matthew Venn, the born outsider, is able to engage with the place most with its echoes of the Barum Brethren he grew up with. City girl Jen is freaked by the place and Ross laments time away from his home life. Matthew’s husband, Jonathan, has little to do within this novel, and as their relationship has definitely been one of the series’ highpoints for me, I thought this might be detrimental but the atmosphere and tightly structured exciting plot means that I did not miss this aspect being less prevalent here.
Sometimes, when I read a good police procedural I can be not all that bothered who the perpetrator of the crimes turns out to be. I can just get locked into the interplay between the characters, the effects of the past upon the present and the steps the police take (logical or otherwise) to seek justice. Here, I think the actual resolution of the plot felt the least convincing aspect of the novel, but that doesn’t matter that much on this occasion as the author has created such an authentic environment and enriched her series characters by placing them in plausible and often gripping situations.
The Raging Storm is published on 31st August 2023. Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

Matthew Venn is back for his third installment in this series set in North Devon. This time, he investigates the murder of sailor-adventurer Jeremy Rosco, once a local boy, who swans into town for a mysterious assignation, only to get himself murdered. Very atmospheric, not just with the eponymous storm, but also the descriptions of the landscape, the people and relationships, and the overall low-key disquiet that never really went away.

I wasn't terribly convinced about the motive, but this one is about the journey, not the destination. While the first Venn book was all about the detective taking his first tentative steps back in the community he spent his childhood in, in this book he seems to be a well-know figure. Venn comes across as aloof and yet caring; he seemed oddly distant from his husband, and I couldn't tell if that is building up to something. We'll see, I guess.

#TheRagingStorm #NetGalley

I have read previous Ann Cleves books but this is the first in the Venn series. Unfortunately I didn't particularly enjoy it. I liked Ross and Jen but not Venn. The story lagged in the middle but carried on hoping for a good ending. The ending was so unbelievable and out of character that I wished I had abandoned earlier.
Although this book wasn't for, I am sure many fans of Ann will enjoy it.

An enjoyable read, a mixture of a whodunnit and a complex detective lead plot. Although this is book 3 in a series about the lead detective Venn it works well as a stand alone novel. Recommended.
Thank you to NetGalley and PanMacmillan for the advance copy of this book.

Absolutely brilliant, Ann Cleeves at her best. This is the 3rd case for Matthew Venn and his team. I couldn’t put it down. The plot kept you guessing right up to the end. This was definitely the best so far with her new detective. Thoroughly recommend this.