The Rising Tide

 The Rising Tide (2022) by Ann Cleeves

 Every five years for fifty years, a group of friends have met for a reunion stemming from their school days. A young new teacher brought together promising students for an "Only Connect" field trip to Holy Island, an island cut off from the mainland each day at high tide. It was a time to connect as students and friends; to learn more about themselves and each other. Philip, Annie, Rick, Louisa, and Kenny spending a weekend of rituals together--quiet time in the chapel, meals prepared a certain way and always by Annie, telling the same stories over and over, and each year learning one more new thing about one of them. 

After the way their first reunion ended, it's kind of surprising that they still get together. There was an argument between Rick and Isobel, older sister to Louisa and a member of the Only Connect group. Isobel stormed off in her car, headed for the mainland. But the tide was rising and she didn't make it. It was put down as an accident--a young woman driving too fast across the causeway with water making everything slick. 

Now, fifty years later, Rick's "new thing" for the group is the revelation that he's writing a novel based on real life. Is it based on his life in the limelight? Up till recently, he'd been a celebrity on television. But his ratings had been dropping and then sexual misconduct allegations forced the show to fire him. Is he going to use fiction to tell his side of the story? But certain comments made during the course of the evening seem to indicate that the events he has in mind may relate to his "connection" friends. When he's found hanging in his bedroom the next morning in what might have been taken for suicide, Inspector Vera Stanhope soon realizes they are dealing with murder. But who needed Rick to die and why? Vera has a feeling that the events of fifty years ago are important, but every question seems to lead to a dead end. Until a conversation late in the investigation shows Vera what they all had been missing.

This is the first Vera Stanhope book I've read (yes, jumping in late to the series--but it doesn't seem to have hurt my enjoyment or understanding of the book). Cleeves does another great job with setting and character in this outing. The island has an almost mystical quality and the fog plays an important role just as it did in her book Thin Air which I read earlier this month. The group of friends is portrayed as a tight-knit bunch, but we soon know that they all are keeping things back and have secrets--not just from the police, but from each other as well. Cleeves does well with her red herrings--within the group and with various motives and suspects outside the group. I changed my mind several times about who did it and when Vera went to what I thought was her final interview, I thought I had landed on the right one. 

Spoiler Alert: I didn't. So, well done, Ann Cleeves. An enjoyable mystery (except for that final death--I'm not a fan of that one) and now I believe I need to go back to the beginning and work my way forward. ★★★★

First line: Philip was the first of the group to the island.

There was no point, she'd learned, in raging against the inevitable, and incompetent bosses seemed to be inevitable. (p. 221)

Last lines: Then she got into her Land Rover and drove back to her cottage in the hills to grieve in her own way. There, she could howl to her heart's content.
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Deaths = 4 (one drowned; two smothered; one hit on head)