The Healers is the 5th Inspector Ramsay standalone mystery by Ann Cleeves. Originally released in 1995, this reformat and re-release 6th Jan 2026 by Macmillan is 288 pages and is available in paperback, audio, and ebook formats. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout.
Back-to-nature "hippies", alternative healing, and a fairly hefty land and property dispute culminates in murder and it's left to quiet, compassionate, intelligent Inspector Ramsay and his team to get to the bottom of the entwined crimes. It's a recurring theme in this series that the stories are quite sad in places and this one is no exception; it deals plainly with mental health issues, ideation/suicide, sexual and physical abuse, housing insecurity/homelessness, and other distressing facts of modern life.
The unabridged audiobook has a run time of 7 hours 48 minutes and is capably read by series narrator Simon Mattacks. He has a beautifully modulated classically trained light baritone voice and does a great job of delineating a range of characters of both sexes and a number of regional accents, shifting quickly and flawlessly. Sound and production quality are high throughout the read.
Although it's the fifth 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 mostly unexpected.
This series is definitely not as polished as her later work, but there are glimpses of the style and development which later gave rise to Vera and Shetland. It has "good bones" and works very well, despite the pervasive melancholy which threads throughout the entire series.
Four stars. Well worth seeking out for fans of moody atmospheric British crime.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
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