Tired of struggling against the rising tide of crime in Portsmouth, D.S. Jimmy Suttle heads west with his wife, Lizzie, and young daughter. Soon he is investigating the murder of a long-distance rower in the small town of Exmouth. The man rowed in the same five-man boat as a man who, years before, dodged a murder charge when his wife went missing during a cross-Atlantic rowing challenge. There had been tensions between the two. Has a killer killed again? As the job takes over, Lizzie is increasingly unhappy about the move. And as his marriage frays at the edges and his 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...