Excerpt from The Long Call by Ann Cleeves, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'Where are you?'

'On my way. Jen's with me. The news has only just come through. There's a plod there who went out to the first call. Like you, HQ thought it would be an accident.'

Plod. Matthew bit back a criticism about the lack of respect for a colleague. You speak about a fellow officer like that and you'll end up back in uniform yourself. This wasn't the time. Matthew was still new to the team. He'd save the comment for the next appraisal. Besides, Ross was the DCI's golden boy and it paid to go carefully. 'I'll meet you at the scene. Park at the end of the toll road and we'll walk from there.' The last thing they needed was a car stuck in the sand on the track to the point.

This early in the season there was little tourist traffic. In the middle of the summer it could take him more than an hour to drive home from the police station in Barnstaple, nose to tail behind big cars that blocked the narrow lanes and would have been ridiculous even in the London suburbs where they were registered. Today he sailed over the new bridge across the River Taw; upstream, he glimpsed Rock Park and the school where he'd been a student. He'd been a dreamer then, escaping into stories, losing himself on long, lonely walks. Imagining himself as a poet in the making. No one else had seen him that way. He'd been anonymous, one of those kids easily forgotten by teachers and the other pupils. When he'd turned up at a reunion a few years ago, he'd realized he'd had few real friends. He'd been too much of a conformer, too pious for his own good. His parents had told him he'd be a great preacher and he'd believed them.

He was jolted back to the present when he hit Braunton. A village when he'd been growing up but it felt like a small town now, not quite on the coast, but the gateway to it. The kids were coming out of school, and he tried to control his impatience at the lights in the village centre. Then a left turn towards the mouth of the estuary, where the Taw met the Torridge and flowed into the Atlantic. In the distance to the north stood the shoulder of Baggy Point, with the white block of a grand hotel just below the horizon. Monumental, but at the same time insubstantial because of the distance and the light.

This, as Ross had said, was home territory, but because he was approaching a crime scene, Matthew took in the details. The small industrial park, where they made surfboards and smart country clothes; the strip fields, brought back to life to feed incomers and posh grockles organic vegetables. The road narrowed; on each side a dry-stone wall, the stones laid edge on, with a hedge at the top. There were already catkins and soon there would be primroses. In sheltered parts of their garden they were already in bloom.

When Matthew hit the marsh, the sky widened and his mood lifted, just as it always did. If he still believed in the Almighty, he'd have thought his response to the space and the light a religious experience. It had been a wet winter and the ditches and the pools were full, pulling in gulls and wading birds. The flatland still had the colours of winter: grey, brown and olive. No sight of the sea here, but if he got out of the car, he'd be able to smell it, and in a storm he'd hear it too, the breakers on the long beach that ran for miles towards the village of Saunton.

He got to the toll road that led to the river and saw a uniformed officer standing there, and a patrol car, pulled onto the verge opposite the toll keeper's cottage. The officer had been about to turn Matthew back, but he recognized him and lifted the barrier. Matthew drove through then stopped, pushed a button so his window was lowered.

'Were you first on the scene?'

'Yes, it came in as an accident.' The man was young and still looked slightly queasy. Matthew didn't ask if it was his first body; it would certainly be his first murder. 'Your colleagues are already there. They sent me up to keep people away.'

Excerpted from The Long Call by Ann Cleeves. Copyright © 2019 by Ann Cleeves. Excerpted by permission of Minotaur Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.