The Sleeping and the Dead, Ann Cleeves

A standalone mystery novel from prolific author Ann Cleeves - I listened to this as an audio book borrowed from the library. Set in Northumberland, Detective Peter Porteous is called to Cranwell Lake, where a diving instructor has found the body of a teenager, clearly dead for many years. A quick trawl through missing person reports concludes that the body is that of an enigmatic and secretive young man who had been reported missing in the early 1970s (I'm pretty sure now that the blurb is wrong - wasn't he reported missing by a lawyer after his foster parents died...?).

The discovery comes as a particular shock to his old girlfriend, now prison officer, Hannah Morton - she'd been with him on the night he disappeared and there's something she's not telling anyone, although to be fair, it's hard to work out what with the depth and variety of red herrings being dumped about the place.

I'm not sure that this suffered from being a listen rather than a read, but the core mystery just seemed to keep going missing in the middle of what felt like a fish monger's at more than one point. There were so many red herrings, and so much attempted distraction from the truth, that it ended up distracting from the entire story which I really REALLY struggled to hang onto. And the conclusion, when it did arrive, was downloaded in such a hurry, particularly given the convoluted nature of the motive, I was very underwhelmed in the end - in fact my notes for the final chapter included say "lot of noise just to end up here...".

Normally I just love everything that Ann Cleeves writes - this is the first one that I came away from thinking well that was a bit of a disappointment. Maybe start with Shetland, or the wonderful Vera series if you're new to this writer's work.