“A family home though they had no family yet.” It’s a sign of Matthew’s equanimity or phlegmatic nature that he bought a place on the cheap “because it was prone to flooding,” thus making it affordable. Matthew can see his house, Spindrift, in the distance. Matthew speaks to the officer on the scene and learns that a dog-walker spotted the body and that the elderly couple that live on the beach are champing at the bit to learn all the details. There’s no serenity in a death scene the corpse “lay out on his back on the sand, and Matthew could see the stab wound in the chest, the bloodstained clothing.” He spots a “subtly drawn” tattoo of a bird on the man’s neck. If he still believed in the Almighty, he’d have thought his response to the space and light a religious experience. When Matthew hit the marsh, the sky widened and his mood lifted, just as it always did. Ross tells his boss to get back because “someone’s found a body on the beach at Crow Point,” where Matthew lives. Rugby player Ross is a “pacer and a shouter, a pumper of iron” and a “team player except, it seemed when he was at work.” A damning portrait in two sentences. Cleeves skewers characters like an entomologist pinning a butterfly. He’s flaked out against “the perimeter wall of the cemetery” when his constable, Ross May, calls him. He recognizes Dennis Salter’s “passionate tone of a voice.” He pictures the organist “bent double over the keys, dressed entirely in black, hands like claws, a nose like a beak.” When Matthew was a child, “he’d been a member of the Barum Brethren by birth and commitment,” and his estrangement from the oppressive evangelical faith of his father impacts his detective work.
Why isn’t the dead man’s son inside the chapel properly mourning his father alongside the congregation? Matthew moves close enough to the open doors to hear the words of the service. He stood outside the North Devon Crematorium on the outskirts of Barnstaple, a bed of purple crocus spread like a pool at his feet, and he watched from a distance as the hearse carried his father to the chapel of rest.
The day they found the body on the shore, Matthew Venn was already haunted by thoughts of death and dying. As a teenager, Ann Cleeves lived in North Devon, and that familiarity infuses The Long Call with accuracy and a certain nostalgia, particularly since Detective Inspector Matthew Venn has to revisit his past in the course of the investigation. The Long Call is the first of her two-part Two Rivers series set in North Devon. It’s cause for rejoicing when British mystery writer Ann Cleeves gifts us with a new series. The Long Call by Ann Cleeves―bestselling and award-winning author of the Vera and Shetland series, both of which are hit TV shows―is the first in the gripping new Two Rivers series set in North Devon and featuring Detective Inspector Matthew Venn.
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