Ann Cleeves Returns with 'The Heron's Cry,' the Extraordinary Sequel to 'The Long Call'

Ann Cleeves has become a book-to-TV-series maven.

The New York Times best-selling author’s books have spawned two hit television shows, Shetland, starring Douglas Henshall, and Vera, with Academy Award nominee Brenda Blethyn playing Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope. Both series are streaming on BritBox in the United States, as will the adaptation of The Long Call, the first book in Cleeves’ Two Rivers series, which will premiere on BritBox in 2022.

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The Heron’s Cry is Cleeves’ latest book and the second in the Two Rivers series, following The Long Call. As the book opens, the summer heat has been suffocating, and Detective Inspector Matthew Venn is called to a grisly murder scene at a rural artists home. Inside, a man has been fatally stabbed with a shard from one of his daughter’s exquisite blown-glass vases. The mystery deepens when another victim is killed in the same way. Venn, along with officers Ross May and Jen Rafferty, must tread carefully through the lies that smolder at the heart of this English seaside county, bringing to light dark secrets, including a clandestine suicide club led by a shadowy figure known as The Crow.

Interestingly, Cleeves never set out to write series fiction. In fact, it didn’t occur to her to think beyond her first novel, A Bird in the Hand, which was published in 1986 and features an elderly birdwatcher and his wife, George and Molly Palmer-Jones, who bump into bodies on nature reserves and in other wild places.

“That was a struggle enough,” she says. “But then the book was accepted for publication, and my editor suggested that mystery readers liked series and why didn’t I think of working on another title using the same characters?”

That turned out to be good advice. In the 30-plus years since, Cleeves has made a career of the multibook universe, long before it was downloadable (or binge-watchable). In addition to the eight books in the George and Molly Palmer-Jones series, she has penned six books in the Inspector Ramsay series, nine in the Vera Stanhope series and eight in the Shetland series, among other books, including two stand-alone novels. “I love writing series, which gives the space to develop character over time,” she says. “As a reader, I’ve always loved the chance to return to people and places I’ve come to know, and I enjoy that as a writer, too.”

In The Heron’s Cry, Cleeves returns to North Devon, where she lived as a teenager and which is beloved by surfers and artists as well as tourists, particularly in the summertime. “Think a mini-California, but with a lot more rain!” she says. “Of course, North Devon is more complex than that. There are faded seaside towns, attracting seasonal workers and people with problems, and some areas of high rural poverty further inland. Second-homers and holiday rentals mean that young locals find it hard to find anywhere decent to live. But that complexity makes it very interesting to write about.”

That complexity also provides the perfect backdrop for North Devon’s residents, who are as wonderfully complicated as the county in which they live. Case in point: Cleeves’ Detective Matthew Venn is a buttoned-up, gay, married ex-evangelical, and a blend of compassion and toughness. “I was attracted by the notion of creating a very moral man,” she says. “Venn grew up in a tight, enclosed Christian community, and even though he lost his faith, he retained his morality.”