What is The Long Call about?

The Long Call opens a new series from Ann Cleeves, best known for the Vera and Shetland books, set on the remote north Devon coast. Detective Matthew Venn grew up in a strict Brethren religious community and was expelled years ago for being gay; the opening pages take place at his father's funeral, which he attends despite knowing his community will see his presence as an intrusion. Shortly after, a man is found murdered on the beach near Matthew's home — a man connected, it turns out, to the same Brethren community Matthew thought he'd left behind.

The novel works on two levels simultaneously. On the surface it is a carefully constructed procedural with a cast of connected characters in a specific rural setting — a day center for adults with disabilities plays a key role, and Cleeves writes those characters with care and without condescension. Beneath that, it is a novel about what it costs to leave a community defined by moral certainty, and what happens when that departure is never quite complete. Matthew's outsider status shapes every interaction he has, both personally and professionally.

Cleeves writes landscape the way other writers write character. The Devon estuary — tidal, shifting, seasonally brutal — functions as more than backdrop. The sense of a place that is beautiful and isolated and resistant to easy reading extends to the human landscape of the book. Matthew's husband Jonathan is one of the more thoughtful depictions of a secondary character in recent crime fiction: present, supportive, and also navigating his own questions about their shared life.

The Long Call is slower and more emotionally careful than the typical police procedural. The mystery plot is solid but the book's real achievement is making Matthew Venn feel like someone you'd want to spend several books with — a detective whose damage is legible without being melodramatic, and whose method grows naturally from who he is.