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.