The Girls on the Shore

Its place in Two Rivers

The Girls on the Shore is book 3 in the Two Rivers series. It follows The Heron's Cry. It is followed by The Raging Storm. See the full Two Rivers reading order.

Detective Inspector Matthew Venn returns to the North Devon town he fled as a teenager — driven out by a strict evangelical community that couldn't accept who he was — to investigate a body washed up near the meeting point of the Taw and Torridge rivers, the confluence that gives Ann Cleeves's third series its name. Venn is a departure from her earlier detectives: precise, awkward, still working out his relationship with his estranged family and his marriage to Jonathan, who runs the local arts center. Around him…