Book Review: The Long Call (Two Rivers #1) by Ann Cleeves

Summary: The Long Call (Two Rivers #1) by Ann Cleeves

In North Devon, where the rivers Taw and Torridge converge and run into the sea, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father's funeral takes place. The day Matthew turned his back on the strict evangelical community in which he grew up, he lost his family too.

Now he's back, not just to mourn his father at a distance, but to take charge of his first major case in the Two Rivers region; a complex place not quite as idyllic as tourists suppose.

A body has been found on the beach near to Matthew's new home: a man with the tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death.

Finding the killer is Venn’s only focus, and his team’s investigation will take him straight back into the community he left behind, and the deadly secrets that lurk there.

Book Review: The Long Call (Two Rivers #1) by Ann Cleeves

Seemingly entangled and confusing events in a right old mess with an ending I didn’t see coming.

Simon Walden is the victim of a brutal murder on the beach at Crow Point, Barnstable, North Devon. He is an army veteran who has severe alcohol problems and depression following a car accident where a little girl died. Volunteering at the Woodyard Day Centre for people with learning disabilities, he seems to get on ok working as a chef. He is temporarily renting a room with two other women in town, but as the case progresses it is found he hides plenty of secrets.

This was quite a confusing mess to deal with from the get go, not made any easier by Venn’s own troublesome connections to several persons of interest. Venn’s husband Jonathan manages the Woodyard Day Centre, which makes Venn’s feel too closely connected to the case. He considers withdrawing from the investigation. DCI Oldham, however, persuades him to stay on.

DS Jen Rafferty is a single mother who is an experienced police sergeant.  Because of her superb people skills she is boss’ go-to person when he wants to have sensitive and vulnerable people questioned. She is divorced following violence in her marriage, has relocated from Liverpool and has a hard time taking care of her two teenage children while working long hours as a police. I find her character really easy to like. She has struggles many women can relate to, including me, and she uses these experiences to do a brilliant job as a police.

DS Ross May is boss’ golden boy and DCI Joe Oldham’s eyes and ears within Barnstable Police. He has a nervous energy which irritates Venn. To be honest it irritates me too! In the beginning of the story, his people skills appear to be seriously lacking as he prefers to be on the go at all times. He doesn’t care overly much for details in the investigation. I find his character develops positively and towards the end I feel more sympathetic towards him.

Must say I worried along the way if Venn and his team would manage to solve this case. The long call of the seagull, high and deafening, could be read as a metaphor for a wake-up-call of something sinister going on. Simon Walden’s murder a symptom of something very wrong surfacing, impossible not to notice.

I liked that we get to learn something about how a care center for people with learning disabilities might work and what protective measures would need to be taken to make sure vulnerable users were safe in public. We get to follow the lives of two women with Down’s Syndrom, Lucy Braddock and Chrissy Shapland who attend Woodland Day Centre.

This work deals with issues not only with murder, but also, sexual and domestic abuse, alcoholism and mental health issues. Last, but not least, religion, as it relates to sexual orientation. Cleeves manages to tie it up and include it all in the story in an impressive way.

I highly recommend The Long Call for readers of Ann Cleeve’s other work and readers of crime fiction in general.

My rating: 5 stars/5

All opinions in this review are my own.

About The Author

Ann is the author of the books behind ITV's VERA, now in it's third series, and the BBC's SHETLAND, which will be aired in December 2012. Ann's DI Vera Stanhope series of books is set in Northumberland and features the well loved detective along with her partner Joe Ashworth. Ann's Shetland series bring us DI Jimmy Perez, investigating in the mysterious, dark, and beautiful Shetland Islands...

Ann grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. Her father was a village school teacher. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs - child care officer, women's refuge leader, bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard - before going back to college and training to be a probation officer.
While she was cooking in the Bird Observatory on Fair Isle, she met her husband Tim, a visiting ornithologist. She was attracted less by the ornithology than the bottle of malt whisky she saw in his rucksack when she showed him his room. Soon after they married, Tim was appointed as warden of Hilbre, a tiny tidal island nature reserve in the Dee Estuary. They were the only residents, there was no mains electricity or water and access to the mainland was at low tide across the shore. If a person's not heavily into birds - and Ann isn't - there's not much to do on Hilbre and that was when she started writing. Her first series of crime novels features the elderly naturalist, George Palmer-Jones. A couple of these books are seriously dreadful. (From Amazon)
To learn more about the author, visit https://www.anncleeves.com/