Ann Cleeves, in her sixth and final book of the Inspector Ramsay series, takes us back to 1997. Ramsay has learnt over time to take notice of his intuition … ‘It seemed to me that things were far from fine’ … when he had cause to visit a family living in The Headland community not far from his own village of Heppleburn.
Many weeks later, when the mother of the house he had visited is reported missing, he acts immediately. He advises the missing persons section of Northumbria police that he will investigate.
He notices searchers are concentrating their efforts inland. Ramsay decides to go the other way and finds the missing woman’s body floating close to a jetty. Although it looks like an accidental drowning, the policeman’s decision to treat it as a suspicious death is proved correct.
Interviews, anonymous phone messages and local gossip fail to throw up a plausible reason for her murder.
When a local child goes missing, manpower is diverted to find the perpetrator.
Both cases are eventually solved after records of interviews are carefully and intelligently analysed.
Ann Cleeves’ prose flows well as she gives us clues and hints. Some are helpful … others are downright misleading. I shall miss dedicated, calm and unassuming Inspector Ramsay.
Reviewed by Clive Hodges
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ann grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon in the UK. Her father was a village school teacher. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs – child care officer, women’s refuge leader, bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard – before going back to college and training to be a probation officer.
BOOKS
In 2006 Ann Cleeves was the first winner of the prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award of the Crime Writers’ Association for Raven Black, the first volume of her ‘Shetland’ series. In addition, she has been short listed for a CWA Dagger Awards – once for her short story The Plater, and twice for the Dagger in the Library award, which is awarded not for an individual book but for an author’s entire body of work.
On 26 October 2017, Ann was presented with the Diamond Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association, the highest honour in British crime writing.
Raven Black was shortlisted for the Martin Beck award for best translated crime novel in Sweden in 2007. A television adaptation of The Long Call, the first in Ann’s Two Rivers series set in North Devon, was broadcast in October 2021. Thirteen series of ‘Vera’, the ITV adaptation starring Brenda Blethyn, have been shown in the UK and worldwide: series 12 ended on an amazing 50th episode, based on Ann’s novel The Darkest Evening. A fourteenth series is promised for 2025. There have also been eight series of ‘Shetland’, based on – or inspired by – the characters and settings of her Shetland novels, and two further series have been announced, filming in 2024 and 2025.
She was awarded an OBE in the 2022 New Year Honours List, “for services to Reading and Libraries.”
In July 2023, during the opening ceremony for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, Ann was presented with the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award, in recognition of her impressive writing career.
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