North Devon is enjoying a rare hot summer with tourists flocking to its coastline. Detective Matthew Venn is called out to a rural crime scene at the home of a group of artists. What he finds is an elaborately staged murder—Dr Nigel Yeo has been fatally stabbed with a shard of one of his glassblower daughter’s broken vases. Then another body is found—killed in a similar way. Matthew must tread carefully through the lies that fester at the heart of his community.
Ann Cleeves’ 30+ books have been translated into twenty languages. She is wildly popular in the UK and two of her book series have been made into multi-season television series, another into a movie. Somehow, I’d never heard of her.
I enjoyed The Heron’s Cry immensely, which I received as a review copy from NetGalley and the publisher. I wish I would have read the first book in the new Two Rivers series, The Long Call (now on my TBR list), but The Heron’s Cry was fine as a standalone. The characters were richly drawn and flawed, and the plot was complex, twisty and suspenseful. 4 stars.
Genre: Mystery
Read-alikes: The Life We Bury by Allen Eskens, The Long Way Home by Louise Penny, The Blackhouse by Peter May