D/S Jimmy Suttle has finally tired of the relentless struggle against the rising tide of urban crime in Portsmouth. Surely a job in Major Crimes in the West Country will offer some respite? He finds a remote cottage nestled in a fold of Dartmoor and, with his wife and two-year-old daughter, heads West for what he is sure will be a saner existence. How wrong could he be?
Soon he is investigating the murder of a long-distance rower in the small town of Exmouth. The man rowed in the same 5-man boat as a man who, two years before, dodged a murder charge when his wife went missing during a cross atlantic rowing challange. There had been tensions between the two. Has a killer killed again?
As the job takes over, Lizzie, Suttle's wife, is increasingly unhappy about the move. Trying to juggle family life with her own new job on a local paper, isolated in a lonely cottage with a demanding toddler and struggling to make new friends, Lizzie thought the whole point of the move was that she and Suttle could at least see more of each other.