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.

As his marriage frays at the edges and his first investigation becomes mired Suttle begins to feel the hills around their cottage crowding in, the wind over the moors above ever chillier, the waters ever greyer. He really has reached land's end...