North Devon is enjoying a rare hot summer with tourists flocking to its coastline. Detective Matthew Venn is called out to a rural crime scene at the home of a group of artists.
What he finds is an elaborately staged murder - Dr Nigel Yeo has been fatally stabbed. His daughter Eve is a glassblower, and the murder weapon is a shard of one of her broken vases. Dr Yeo seems an unlikely murder victim.
He's a good man, a public servant, beloved by his daughter. Matthew is unnerved, though, to find that she is a close friend of Jonathan, his husband. Then another body is found - killed in a similar way.
Matthew finds himself treading carefully through the lies that fester at the heart of his community and a case that is dangerously close to home . . .
The Heron's Cry is the second novel in Ann Cleeves' Two Rivers crime series, following her Sunday Times bestseller, The Long Call.
