No-one liked Jake Kinsey. A rich man, he turned up out of nowhere, acquired Exmouth’s trophy penthouse flat and then bought his way into the local rowing club. No friends, not much of a rower, not a nice guy. And now, after a long fall from balcony, he’s dead. One concrete fact in a web of innuendo, half-truths and rumour.
D/S Jimmy Suttle, a newcomer to the Devon and Cornwall force from his old job on Major Crimes in Portsmouth, is the one detective who suspects that Kinsey has been killed. But why? And by whom?
Answers don’t come easy. Evidence is thin. His boss, beset by budget cuts and the pressure of other cases, needs to move on. Except that Suttle is more and more certain that he’s looking at murder.
Jimmy Suttle is left to work alone – all too conscious that time, the pressures of the Job and the wreckage of his private life are lengthening the odds against any kind of result.
The enquiryis dead in the water. Suttle’s wife, embittered by the move to a remote country cottage, is threatening to decamp with their daughter Grace. Worse still, the deepening shadow of a killing relating to Jimmy’s old life is creeping ever closer.
Western Approaches: one man’s bid to gamble his own integrity against the mounting chaos of the lives around him.