This book is hard to review.  The first half to three-quarters was hard to read.  The author wrote popular TV series previously, and this could be why it read like a screenplay.  Person said this, person responded this, scene was that, end scene.  It didn't help that the paragraph formatting and Kindle load are off, but could be because ARC.
Despite this, there is good character building.  The second half, especially last 1/3 was excellent. The denouement was a surprise to this reader.  Not a cliffhanger but like a season finale as this is the first in a series.
Lots of touchy subjects, but handled well.

My first Ann Cleeves book, I can't wait to read more. This book was an intricately woven procedural crime novel. Nothing too flashy, real people with lives and back stories. I highly recommend this book!

* I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

This was my first book by Ann Cleeves and I found it very slow and not to my taste. I didn’t really feel connected to the characters and had a hard time finishing it. I will definitely try other books by her before I make a decision but this one just didn’t do it for me. Thanks to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This is a solid first installment in the new British police procedural series called Two Rivers, by the author best known for the Shetland series as well as the Vera Stanhope books.

While the book gets off to a bit of a slow start, it really picks up and the reader soon finds that friends and neighbors are not always what they seem.

This series, featuring detective Matthew Venn, offers a huge amount of potential and I, for one, am absolutely looking forward to reading the next books in the series.

Highly recommended, suspenseful mystery written by a real pro.

What a treat to be introduced to Ann Cleeves. I had never heard about this prolific writer and it was exciting to get my hands on the first in a new series.This is a winner for police procedural fans. The book begins when Matthew is standing outside the church at his father's funeral. When he lost faith in the church's evangelical stance, he was not welcome back with open arms. While in the university he came out as gay and had since married .Meanwhile, shoot back to the funeral where a washed up body is found at the beach with a stab wound .Matthew and his two work partners now begin the messy work of trying to uncover the murderer.The book excels at giving a visual sense of the community and also the complex characters involved as Matthew and his team dig deeper into the clues. However, I felt the book too sluggish in the beginning and had to push myself to the exciting end.

Cleeves’ new series stars Matthew Venn, a British detective living near the sea in North Devon with his new husband and facing emotional demons from the past as well as physical ones in the present. When a dead man is found on the beach and two women with Downs Syndrome are kidnapped, Matthew is convinced there is a connection between the crimes and fears that it may come too close to home. He grew up in the area as a part of a strict evangelical community, the Brethren, and was disenfranchised when he married. His husband is the director of a newly opened community center with connections to both the leader of the Brethren and the victims. Cleeves gives us, in Matthew, a flawed character rife with insecurities. The events in the book begin the process of his healing, as broken family ties appear to be mending. Matthew’s team is introduced, with tensions and backstories developed. The location comes alive and the plotting is complex and intriguing. The resolution satisfies. Cleeves’ fans who are lamenting the end of the Shetland series will find much to love in her new characters and setting.

The Long Call was my first Ann Cleeves' book. I had seen her name in the credits of Shetland and decided to see what her writing was like. As you can expect, I was not disappointed.

First of all, Cleeves gives us a gay male protagonist who has to navigate through the difficult relationships of his past from when and where he grew up as part of a Mennonite-like Christian sect called the Barum Brethren. Somehow, it wasn't being gay that got him shunned from his family and community. It was questioning them. Questioning the authority of the elders and the church was the more severe misconduct.

Of course the Brethren had been hot on the sin of gambling, a vice on a par with adultery, sodomy, and not wearing hats to meetings.

Secondly, the supporting cast of characters are women with Down's Syndrome, particularly the one named Lucy who becomes a target for kidnappers, a murderer, and a rapist. Her friend Christine is taken and has to fight against the odds as the North Devon police search for her. There's a third woman who is named and described, Rosa Holsworthy, who becomes integral in the current cases due to a past crime. It was the way that Cleeves treated each learning disabled character that deserves significant praise. There was no monolith. She gave each woman her own personality, size, maturity, family dynamic, and things they liked. Christine's parents and her aunt and uncle play pivotal roles in the criminal conspiracy. They're also tied to Detective Venn's history with the Brethren and to his husband Jonathan's work life at the Woodyard Center.

Detective Venn has a lot of the qualities of old noir gumshoes. He's so dedicated to his job and solving the cases that he has to make the choice to choose the work over being at home with his husband. Fortunately, Cleeves gives readers the character of Jonathan, always forgiving and understanding about Venn's duties as a cop. Jonathan is a breath of fresh air brought in at the right times when the mood is heavy and dramatic. He is the bright light in Venn's world.

Cleeves also includes the St. Hubert's programs for people with mental illness. She handles the situational environmental and the characters who are in roles of social workers, priests, and the clientele with delicacy. Between the people who attend the Woodyard and those who go to St. Hubert's for therapy and group counseling, there were ample opportunities for Cleeves to slide into stereotypes and myths about mental illness, but she never did. The characters surviving suicides of family members are allowed breathing room to be realistic and flat out honest.

Some of the other people had more severe learning disabilities. They were cared for in a different group. Some couldn't talk, but made odd noises, squeaks, and squeals. There was a man with a head too small for his body, people with twisted limbs, who couldn't walk and used wheelchairs. Maurice was embarrassed now at his reaction, his horror, his feeling that this was some kind of freak show and that his Lucy didn't belong there.

Something I noticed about the way the police in this story address each other was that they use first names. I've noticed this on a BBC property, DCI Banks. Perhaps, like other British-isms I had to look up, this is how it really is over there. I think our police are so militaristic especially in larger departments rather than small towns, that they refer to each other by last name or even nicknames.

The elegance of the sentences left me in a trance of pictures dancing through my mind. Her descriptions are lyrical and willowy. They aren't the kind of poetic metaphors that beat one over the head in annoyance. They're beautiful even when the subject is horrifying.

He pictured Alice Wozencroft bent double over the keys, dressed entirely in black, hands like claws, a nose like a beak. As close to a crow as a woman could be. She'd been old even when he was a boy.

Detective Venn is confronted with violence against the most vulnerable members of his community. His tenacity keeps him moving on little sleep until he protects the next person from being hurt. Part of him worries that his husband will realize how neglectful it feels being at home cooking and cleaning after work only to get the call that Venn won't make it back for dinner.

Venn's colleagues, Ross and Jen are given opportunities to show off their personalities too, though Jen moreso. She's a single mother who would often prefer staying up all night partying than doing either her job or raising kids.

Jen liked the idea of yoga, but didn't have the patience for it. The building was deceptively spacious and light. There were posters on the walls, semi-religious imagery of rainbows and doves, slogans about taking power, and loving the inner you. Here it seemed hope and the possibility of redemption abounded. It made Jen feel like punching someone.

In that one fragment of a paragraph, readers are given all they need to understand what kind of person Jen is.

As for the crimes to solve, there were several which intertwined through the conspiracy. Cleeves takes readers on a ride through the people who define themselves as powerful, entitled, and wielding authority in small towns. She allows the reader to hate a character or change their mind about them as they develop. Simon Walden is a central character, a prime suspect who could be just another alcoholic character looking to be saved. Instead, Cleeves sculpts Walden into a man of mystery, one who takes ownership of his mistakes and seeks redemption. Dennis Salter, a leader of the Brethren and the uncle to Christine, shoots out red flags that he is not a nice man. It's easy to detect Dennis Salter as an evil bastard. That comes out even more in the third act when readers get a better look into his marriage and friendships. Salter never misses the chance to land a digging mocking insult at Detective Venn.

"This is all about conspiracy. Entitled people more worried about their own reputations than the people in their care, losing any sense of humanity along the way. A kind of collective madness. They're all involved to some degree."

Besides the Brethren, there are other so-called Christians who don't seem to have their moral compass pointing due north. Is allowing someone to get away with a crime also a crime itself? Who gets redemption and who doesn't? Who is worthy of another chance and who isn't? Does saving reputations for places that are supposed to be safe havens outweigh publicizing any wrong-doings? Maybe the author has had her own battles with Christian churches or maybe she wrote this to hold up a mirror to the real world.

The crimes also include issues of sexual consent. I have to open about this as a Trigger Warning / Content Note more than ever because it does involve women with Down's Syndrome. The perpetrator, once cornered and forced to confess, goes through all the defenses: "she had a reputation" to promises of "it'll never happen again." Among other sensitive subjects, some mentioned already, there's: self-harm/suicide, depression, sexual violence, gaslighting and domestic violence, and murder. Cleeves handles these situations in ways that I wish other authors would, particularly cis-male authors who don't seem to understand how to write that content without being exploitative and boring old motivations for the hero characters.* The Long Call gets five stars and a new Ann Cleeves fan.

* For more on how to write sexual violence effectively, I have a three-part series: Addressing Rape Culture in Fiction part one, two, and three.

From the author of the Vera and Shetland series, Detective Matthew Venn stands outside of the church where his father’s funeral is taking place. Then he gets a phone call. Secrets from the past and feelings he thought he had left behind.

This book centers on the investigation of the murder of a man whose body is found on the beach in a small English town. I found the book to be rather slow and it didn’t really engage my interest until almost three quarters of the way into it. I didn’t really connect with any of the characters and felt that the only one that had much character development was the lead investigator, Matthew Venn, who, in my opinion, had too many issues for a man who’d risen as far as he had in his career. I unfortunately was not engaged enough to continue on with further books in this series.

Thank you NetGalley for the reading opportunity.

Anne Sleeves is a fantastic author whose books never disappoint. The Long Call has a great storyline and well developed characters. A must read for the year.

My first Ann Cleeves novel and I enjoyed all the characters. I hope to read more with Matthew and Jen. The story was real written and had a few twists. Thank you Netgalley for a copy.

A “cozy” police procedural set in a small British town, with characters that are just as fascinating as the murder mystery. Detective Matthew Venn is shunned by the religious community he grew up in, after his marriage to another man. A murder investigation brings him back in contact with the members of that community, and it also involves his husband Jonathan, who runs the community arts and social services center at the heart of the novel. The two women with Down’s Syndrome are compassionately written and well-developed characters in the novel, not just stereotypes. This is the first novel in a new series “Two Rivers” by Ann Cleeves, and I look forward to seeing more mysteries featuring Matthew Venn and his colleague Jen Rafferty.

Good story line idea with good twists. It slowed down at times. Thanks for making the book available.

My first Ann Cleeves and first in her new Two Rivers detective series.

North Devon - A dead body is found and Inspector Matthew Venn and his two detectives are on the case; one who tries his patience daily and the other the best he's ever worked with.

The murder mystery is a good one, multi-layered with a quite a cast of diverse characters, but none of them really stood out to steal the show or retain my interest enough to continue on with the series.

A bit slow-moving (for me) UNTIL the last quarter.

***Many thanks to St. Martin's Press/Minotaur Books for the arc invite via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review***

Very intriguing from page 1. Kept my interest until the very end and made me sit on the edge of my seat biting my nails the whole time!!

This is my first time reading a book by Ann Cleeves; it probably won't be the last. I am a huge fan of British crime shows and have seen all the episodes of "Vera" and "Shetland" available for streaming. If the books upon which they are based are anything like this one, I could definitely binge read them all.

THE LONG CALL is a character driven story with very modern themes. It has all the atmosphere I have come to appreciate in the series made from her books. Locale is as important as character development. I was struck by her description of one small town as being too bland, modern, and featureless to have been used to make an episode of "Midsomer Murders." (Yes, I've watched all of them as well.)

This is a well written murder mystery with no extraneous characters to misdirect which makes it quite remarkable that the culprit isn't revealed until almost the very end. I had no clue. I think this makes for a great story. Rather than sending the reader down a primrose path, Cleeves follows the characters through their thought processes and frustrations until all the facts become available. Of course, there are some characters that you just know couldn't possibly be the killer because… well, just because.

I absolutely enjoyed reading this, even the parts that made me somewhat uncomfortable. What parts were those? That would be telling. I would say that given the modern tone of the book, there is probably something to give everyone pause but those things will be as varied as the reader. I recommend this book to any and all who read mysteries.

I don’t think this book was for me. The pace was too slow and I just didn’t connect early enough with the story and characters to keep my attention the whole way through.
This was the first novel I have read so far by Ann Cleeves. I’ve heard so many great things about her other mystery series (Vera and Shetland series) so I am going to give some of her backlist a try too.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an opportunity to read the book.

The Long Call is a wonderfully written British police procedural and the first in a new series by best selling author Ann Cleeves. Apparently Ms. Cleeves is a well known, award winning writer whom I have somehow been unaware of until recently. Thankfully, that situation has now been rectified and with this book she has a new fan.

This book is an engrossing mystery that slowly draws you in until you can’t stop thinking about the story. From the engrossing mystery to the locations that are vividly described and the intriguing cast of characters, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. And, it was nice that the characters were so diverse without hitting you over the head with their diversity. They were simply people, first and foremost.

This was a great start to a new series and I cannot wait for the next installment.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

not my cup of tea. have enjoyed her other books, though. would try another selection of hers in the future..

This is the first book in a new series by the author. I had high hopes for the book as it is the first by the author that I have read, but I found it somewhat disappointing. Part of the reason is that I am not familiar with English slang nor the areas of England that were described in the book. The other disappointment was that the book seemed to slog along until the final quarter when it finally picke up the pace. That said, a great many other reviewers really liked the book, it just did not resonate with me.

I received a free Kindle ARC courtesy of Net Galley and the publisher. It was with the understanding that I would provide an honest review and post it on Net Galley, Goodreads, Amazon and my review blog. I also posted it to my Facebook and Twitter pages.