Two Rivers

About the Two Rivers series

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 Cleeves builds a small, textured team — DS Jen Rafferty, a sharp-tongued single mother, and enthusiastic young DC Ross May — investigating crimes that circle back, again and again, to the closed community Matthew left behind.

Set against the estuaries, dunes and small towns of North Devon, the series carries Cleeves's now-signature strengths: unhurried pacing, a powerful sense of place, and mysteries as interested in the psychology of belonging and exclusion as in whodunit mechanics. The Long Call (2019) was adapted into an ITV series, and the books continue at a steady two-to-three-year clip, with a fourth novel, The Dying Light, due in autumn 2026.

How to read this series

Read in publication order, starting with The Long Call (2019). Matthew Venn's family history, his marriage to Jonathan and his working relationships with Jen Rafferty and Ross May all develop across the series, and later books assume knowledge of what came before, though each case is self-contained.

The Girls on the Shore (2022) is a short standalone e-story that slots in by publication date between The Heron's Cry and The Raging Storm; it's optional but gives Jen Rafferty more page time. This is one of three separate detective series by Ann Cleeves (alongside Vera Stanhope and Shetland) with no shared characters or continuity, so there's no need to read the others first.