The Heron's Cry is the second Matthew Venn procedural murder mystery by Ann Cleeves. Due out 7th Sept 2021 from Macmillan on their Minotaur imprint, it's 384 pages and will be available in hardcover, audio, and ebook formats.
This is another beautifully written mystery set in North Devon and featuring Detective Matthew Venn, a cerebral and solemnly intelligent investigator tasked with unraveling a bizarre and showy murder; a doctor administrator who turns up dead in his daughter's glassblowing studio stabbed with a piece of glass. The pacing of the investigation is unhurried and the characters built up so well and in such detail that they live and breathe. Even the secondary characters, Ross, the Mackenzie family, Lauren Miller and the others are carefully and completely delineated and distinct. I loved that one of my favourite characters from book 1 (Lucy Braddick) is included in this book as well. It really was a delight to read.
Although it's the second book in the series, it works very well as a standalone. This book is also quite intricately plotted, but there aren't any major spoilers if they're read out of order. The denouement and resolution were exciting and (for me at least) mostly unexpected. I'm usually pretty good at figuring out "whodunnit" and this time I missed almost completely. Well played, Ms. Cleeves.
The author does a good job of showing the frustrations and difficulties of dealing with acute mental illness and some of the constraints, both internal and external, of the NHS. Potentially triggering content includes suicide, suicide ideation, and failure of care. The language is rough in places (R-rated), and there are some blood/gore descriptions on page.
The audiobook is unabridged, has a run time of slightly over 10 hours, and is most expertly narrated by Jack Holden. He has a pleasantly nuanced voice and manages numerous characters with widely divergent accents (and ages, and both sexes) impressively well. One of the main characters is from Liverpool, the secondary characters are varied and have accents from Scotland to the Southwest and points in between, and he manages all of them with expertise and precision. Sound quality and production values are high.
Five stars for the book itself, five for the audiobook. Looking forward to what comes next.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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