The Long Call by Ann Cleeves

The Long Call, published by Pan Macmillan, is the new novel by Ann Cleeves, and it's a noteworthy book given that it launches a brand new series - the "Two Rivers" series, featuring a youngish cop called Matthew Venn. The setting is north Devon, and the rivers in question are the Taw and the Torridge. Ann is closely associated with Northumberland, where she lives, and Shetland, where she met her late husband Tim, and has evoked both areas wonderfully well in two series that have become huge television successes, but the move to north Devon is a very sound one. She has a very good sense of the area, not least because it's where she grew up, and as always she evokes the landscape and atmosphere very effectively.

When I was planning my own first novel, I was naturally interested to find out what other writers of a similar age who had managed to get published were doing, and that's how I first came across Ann's work, with her original series about George and Molly Palmer-Jones. I was impressed, and although it's undeniably true that Ann has developed enormously as a writer over the years (as all good writers do), there is real merit in those early books, even though she's always been self-deprecating about them. It's hard now to believe that one of the books in the series, Sea Fever, was even turned down for publication in the UK, though it was accepted by an American publisher, and much later it did come out in this country. I felt that all the signs were there, right from the outset, of a strong and thoughtful interest in character and landscape, elements that have made her books international best-sellers since TV came along, but the plots are sound, too. This is also true, by the way, of yet another of her series, the enjoyable books featuring Inspector  Ramsay.

The starting point for Matthew's investigation is the discovery on the beach of a male corpse. The deceased has an albatross tattooed on his neck. He has been stabbed. The case brings Matthew right back into the heart of a community he left long ago, and a sad story is told with Ann's characteristic compassion. The criminal motivation at the heart of the book, incidentally, is one that used to fascinate Dorothy L. Sayers, a rather different crime writer in many ways, but one who (at least in her later work) shared with Ann a determination to write about credible people and emotions and was not content merely to write a routine whodunit.

Matthew is gay, contentedly married to Jonathan, and religious intolerance plays a part in the storyline, but Ann has made the point in interviews that her objective is not to be politically correct but rather to challenge the ridiculous nature of prejudice of any kind. The series has already been optioned for television and the novel has made the  Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller lists. Not a bad start! I'm already looking forward to the next entry in the series.