Matthew felt curiously colourless and I never really felt I got to know him. There doesn’t seem to have been anything untoward in their interaction, despite Matthew doing his best to see beneath the surface of the dead man’s life.Īnn Cleeves brings her undoubted talent for evoking a strong sense of place to work in The Long Call, but I was less sure of the characterisation, particularly that of Matthew Venn and his husband Jonathan. To complicate matters, a woman with Down’s Syndrome is abducted after leaving the Woodyard and Matthew is convinced there’s a connection between her and the dead man, who used to sit next to the missing girl, Lucy, on the bus and made her laugh. The connection to the Woodyard causes concern for Matthew as the centre is run by his husband, Jonathan Church, but Matthew’s boss is lazy and doesn’t relish the thought of having to take over as senior investigating office, so Matthew is left to head up the inquiry into the man’s death. The investigation leads in the direction of the Woodyard, a thriving day care centre with a café and an artist in residence, who happens to be one of the dead man’s flatmates. When the body of a man is found on the beach, murder isn’t the first thing on anyone’s mind, but when it’s found that he was stabbed to death, both the police and the locals sit up and take notice and finding the killer becomes Matthew’s priority. His father has now died and even at the funeral Matthew can only watch from a distance, unable to bridge the gap that has grown up between him and his mother. The fact that Matthew is now married to a man was another nail in the coffin of his relationship with his parents. Matthew was brought up in a strict, evangelical Christian setting, but when he turned his back on the sect, he was shunned by his parents and remained estranged from them during his time at university in Bristol and also while he rose in the ranks of the police force, finally returning to the area where he was brought up to both live and work.
In The Long Call she introduces a new series character, Matthew Venn, a detective in North Devon, living and working where the rivers Taw and Torridge converge on the sea.
Ann Cleeves is probably best known for her two police procedural series, both adapted for TV, one featuring DI Jimmy Perez set in the scenic Shetland Islands and the other with DCI Vera Stanhope set in the equally beautiful Northumberland.
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