The Rising Tide: A dark, atmospheric mystery from bestseller Ann Cleeves, featuring Vera Stanhope, star of ITV's Vera

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A dumpy woman with an incisive mind, a terrier-like hold on problems, and the habit of chivying her staff to get results, sometimes pitting them against each other, all in the name of solving the case. The island is atmospheric backdrop for the story with its ruins and religious history, landscape and wildlife and the shifting tides that make the causeway so dangerous to those who don’t pay attention to the them, and plays a very central and tragic part of the novel. A thought that is shared by a member of Vera’s team, Holly, who is trying to decide where her life is going. Who doesn’t love ‘large and shabby’ Vera Stanhope, the blunt detective in Ann Cleeves’s Northumberland police procedurals?

The group is down to Annie, Daniel, Lou, Ken, Rick, and Phillip; Isobel having crossed the causeway too late and having drowned several years before, and Charlotte who stopped coming. However, when a second member of the group is murdered, she also begins to wonder whether secrets in the group’s past may be the key to solving this case. I really enjoyed the Vera presented in this episode: more introspective about those she works with (and how she treats them! The suspects, now mostly in their sixties, are a mixed bunch, with a range of professions including teacher, a priest an ex-model turned life coach and yoga teacher and the owner of a nearby holiday resort, all at a comfortable stage of life where murdering a friend seems unlikely.

Judith Marshall, a 'hippy new-age' personality who led the first group in bonding activities, is now retired and heavily involved in the church.

They reminisce and celebrate the school trip where they first met as teenagers at the Pilgrim’s House. The first Shetland novel, Raven Black , won the CWA Gold Dagger for best crime novel, and Ann was awarded the CWA Diamond Dagger in 2017. She’s brilliantly intuitive, instinctive, a little bit manipulative of her team (in a good way) and her affection for her team especially DS Joe Ashcroft is almost transparent. she’s so unconventional, and unaffected by what others may think of her, but she’s an excellent detective, she’s demanding when it comes to her murder squad team, but they are only too eager give her their best efforts, and please her. Rick has just stepped back from his popular show on BBC being accused of some unseemingly behavior with a female staff member.

Forming a close knot group, they decided to have a reunion after five years and then continued meeting every five years, bringing along partners and kids until now they are back more or less to the original core group.

Relationships made 50 years ago have come and gone, like the tide, but the nucleus of their friendship remains the same. Vera is a star of a protagonist, overweight, with a shambolic appearance that has her giving off the vibes of a bag lady, and here she is mistaken as a cleaner, not that it bothers her in the slightest.I hated it, it sort of spoilt the book for me, but I just reminded myself of how much I’d enjoyed it up to this point, and accepted it for what seemed like a cheap trick…. Good old Rick was also writing a book, with fictionalized events, that wasn't well received among his group of friends.

When the group were still in their early 20s and at their very first five-year reunion, one of their members perished in the dangerous waters that surround the island. Vera knows exactly how to lead her team to get the best out of each of them, and Cleeves doesn’t do things without having a purpose. This is a superb setting especially as the tide rises and rolls in adding an extra dimension of atmosphere especially as concealed secrets find their way to the surface, bubbling up like the waves.

It wasn't very interesting and if not for the obligation I felt having been given early access on NetGalley from the publisher, I wouldn't have finished the book.