Ann Cleeves Books in Order: Vera, Shetland & Two Rivers Guide

Ann Cleeves has spent four decades writing crime fiction rooted in the landscapes of northern and coastal Britain, and in doing so she has created two of the most recognisable detectives in British television history: Vera Stanhope, the rumpled, intuitive detective inspector of Northumberland, and Jimmy Perez, the quiet, precise detective of the Shetland Islands. That both characters have attracted long-running ITV and BBC adaptations is a measure not just of their commercial appeal but of their depth — these are protagonists whose appeal on screen derives entirely from how fully realised they are on the page.

What distinguishes Cleeves within British crime fiction is her commitment to place as a structuring principle rather than mere backdrop. Northumberland is not where Vera happens to work; it is, in some fundamental sense, what produces her — the moorland, the grey light, the working-class communities built around industries that have largely disappeared. Shetland is not a picturesque setting for Jimmy Perez’s investigations; it is an isolated, weather-beaten world with its own social codes, its own history, and its own way of dealing with outsiders. When Cleeves places a body in these landscapes, the landscape itself becomes part of the mystery.

In 2006, this approach earned its most significant recognition: Raven Black, the first Shetland novel, won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger — the most prestigious prize in British crime fiction. Cleeves was the first author since P.D. James to win with a debut in a new series. The award confirmed what her readers already knew: that she was doing something more than producing competent genre fiction.

Quick answer: Each series is self-contained. Start with The Crow Trap for Vera, Raven Black for Shetland, or The Long Call for Two Rivers. If you want only one book, start with Raven Black — it is the Gold Dagger winner and the best single entry point to her work.

All Ann Cleeves Series at a Glance

Vera Stanhope Series in Order

The Vera series began in 1999 but only found its audience after the ITV adaptation launched in 2011. The books are set in Northumberland — a county of dramatic coastlines, dark moorland, and former mining communities — and follow Detective Chief Inspector Vera Stanhope, a woman of considerable intelligence, unconventional methods, and a personal life she keeps carefully hidden from colleagues and readers alike. Vera is overweight, stubborn, and sometimes cruel to the people around her, which makes her one of the more honest portraits of a senior detective in British crime fiction.

1. The Crow Trap (1999) The first Vera novel and the natural entry point. Three women are sharing a remote Northumberland farmhouse for a survey project when they discover a body. Vera arrives and the investigation unfolds across the moorland landscape in a way that immediately establishes what the series will do: it is less interested in puzzle mechanics than in the texture of lives lived in isolated communities, and the secrets those communities keep. This is the book to start with.

2. Telling Tales (2005) Six years passed between the first and second Vera novels, and Telling Tales reads like a confident return. A woman convicted of murder has died in prison; new evidence has emerged that she may have been innocent. Cleeves uses the structure of a miscarriage of justice story to examine how communities reconstruct themselves around a shared lie, and how that reconstruction can hold for years before it breaks.

3. Hidden Depths (2007) A young man is found drowned, surrounded by wild flowers, and the staging of the body becomes central to the investigation. Cleeves begins to develop Vera’s backstory more deliberately here — her difficult relationship with her late father, the ornithologist and petty criminal Hector Stanhope, which recurs across the series as an explanation for who she has become.

4. Silent Voices (2012) Vera is at a health spa — something so incongruous that it takes a page or two to settle — when a body is found in the swimming pool. A locked-room problem in miniature, and one of the most carefully constructed mysteries in the series. By this point the ITV series was already airing and new readers were arriving at the books from television; Silent Voices demonstrates what the books offer that the adaptation, for all Brenda Blethyn’s brilliance, cannot quite replicate.

5. The Glass Room (2012) Two books in the same year. A creative writing course at a remote retreat provides the setting: a tutor is found dead, and the suspects are all writers, which allows Cleeves a quiet examination of literary ambition, jealousy, and the gap between the stories people tell about themselves and the lives they actually lead.

6. Harbour Street (2014) A woman is stabbed on a packed Metro train and nobody sees anything — or admits to seeing anything. The setting moves closer to the urban fringe of Newcastle and Whitley Bay. This is one of the stronger middle-period entries, with a mystery that turns on the secrecy that older working-class communities maintain as a matter of survival rather than guilt.

7. The Moth Catcher (2015) A young man is found dead near a moth trap set up in the grounds of a Northumberland country estate. Two deaths emerge, linked by the estate, its owners, and the tied cottage community that serves them. Cleeves’s interest in class — in the particular English awkwardness of deference and resentment between employer and employed — is prominent here.

8. The Seagull (2017) One of the most personal Vera novels. An ageing criminal offers information about a thirty-year-old case involving Vera’s own father, Hector. The investigation becomes a reconstruction of a world Vera partially inhabited as a child and partially suppressed as an adult. The book rewards readers who have followed the series from the beginning, though it works as a standalone.

9. The Darkest Evening (2020) Vera, driving through a Northumberland snowstorm, finds an abandoned car with a baby inside and, shortly afterwards, a body. The setting is a country estate with deep local history; the investigation uncovers old money, old sins, and the particular inertia of communities that have protected the same families for generations. The Darkest Evening was longlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger.

10. The Heron’s Cry (2021) A crossover of sorts: this Vera novel is set partly in Devon, where the Two Rivers series takes place, and it shares thematic concerns with The Long Call. A glassblower is found dead in his studio, killed with a shard of his own work. The investigation connects to the earlier Two Rivers books in ways that reward readers familiar with both series.

11. The Raging Storm (2022) The most recent Vera novel, also sharing a title with the third Two Rivers book — a deliberate choice by Cleeves rather than an error. Set on the Northumberland coast during a violent winter storm, the novel isolates its characters in the way that Cleeves handles most effectively: cutting off escape routes, forcing confrontations, making the landscape complicit in what happens.

Shetland Series in Order

The Shetland series is Cleeves’s most acclaimed work and, by most measures, her most fully realised. Set on the islands of Shetland — two hours by ferry north of the Scottish mainland, geographically closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh — the novels follow Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, whose family has lived on the islands for generations, descended from a survivor of the Spanish Armada. Perez is quiet, contained, and attentive in ways that make him an unusual detective protagonist: he does not impose himself on situations; he observes until the situation reveals itself.

The Shetland landscape is not incidental to these novels. The light is different here — the long winter darkness, the summer simmer dim that barely qualifies as night — and so is the social world. Shetland has its own dialect, its own culture distinct from mainland Scotland, its own relationship to outsiders and to the mainland. Cleeves researched the islands extensively and it shows: these books feel earned rather than merely set-dressed.

1. Raven Black (2006) Winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger. A young woman is murdered on New Year’s Day; suspicion falls on an outsider, an older man with a troubled past who is the obvious suspect in every sense — which is to say, probably not the actual killer. Raven Black establishes the series with extraordinary economy: the landscape, the community, Perez’s method, and the moral seriousness that distinguishes the series from most British crime fiction of its period. This is where to start.

2. White Nights (2008) Summer on Shetland — the simmer dim season, when it never fully gets dark. An art festival brings outsiders to the island; a man is found dead in a way that connects to a disappearance from years earlier. The perpetual half-light of the Shetland summer becomes atmospherically central.

3. Red Bones (2009) An archaeological dig on Whalsay disturbs more than ancient history when bones are found that are rather more recent. The novel examines the competing claims that the past makes on the present, and how an island community manages stories about itself that it would prefer to remain buried.

4. Blue Lightning (2010) Perez accompanies his partner Fran to the remote Fair Isle — an island of barely a hundred inhabitants and a famous bird observatory. When a woman is found dead, every potential suspect is on a tiny island from which no one can leave. The isolation plot done at its most rigorous, and the setting of the bird observatory allows Cleeves to develop Perez’s interior life through his relationship to the place and its rhythms.

5. Dead Water (2013) A period of personal crisis for Perez — events in Blue Lightning have changed his circumstances profoundly and the series must reconfigure itself around that. A journalist is found dead, connected to rumours of corruption around the development of Shetland’s wind energy infrastructure. One of the more politically engaged novels in the series.

6. Thin Air (2014) A ghost story of sorts, set during a traditional Shetland fiddle festival. A woman disappears from the coastal clifftops on the first night of the festival. The novel plays knowingly with atmosphere and superstition, drawing on Shetland folklore in ways that enrich the mystery without abandoning rationalism.

7. Cold Earth (2016) A landslide buries a farmhouse during a violent storm; in its aftermath, a woman’s body is found. The novel examines the archaeology of a community — what lies underneath the surface of daily life, and what violence can uncover — with particular attention to the island’s migrant population and its relationship to long-established families.

8. Wild Fire (2018) Perez investigates the death of a nanny in a wealthy household on the Shetland mainland. The Shetland crime fiction setting here comes into tension with a social world — affluent incomers, private school anxieties, the particular pressures of wealthy families living in a remote community — that is not native to the islands. That tension is part of the novel’s point.

9. The Fair Isle (2024) The most recent Shetland novel and the first in six years. Perez returns to Fair Isle, the setting of Blue Lightning, for a case that draws on his deepest connections to the island world he has spent his career investigating. Cleeves has indicated this may be among the final Shetland novels; if so, it is a considered farewell to the landscape and the character that defined her career.

Two Rivers Series in Order

The Two Rivers series is the most recent of Cleeves’s three main series, set in North Devon at the confluence of the Taw and Torridge rivers. Detective Matthew Venn is the protagonist — a gay man from a fundamentalist Christian community, whose identity and background place him permanently at an angle to the communities he investigates. The series is deliberately more contemporary in its concerns than the Vera and Shetland books: questions of sexuality, religion, and community belonging are not subtext here but central matter.

1. The Long Call (2019) The series opener, and the most commercially successful of the Three Rivers novels. A man with a tattoo of an albatross is found dead on the North Devon coast; the investigation draws Venn back into the Barum Brethren, the evangelical community that raised him and from which he was expelled when he came out as gay. Adapted by ITV in 2021 with Ben Aldridge as Venn; the adaptation is an accurate reflection of the novel’s tone and concerns.

2. The Raging Storm (2022) Note that this title is shared with the eleventh Vera novel, published the same year — an unusual choice that initially caused some confusion. A fisherman is found dead below cliffs near the town of Morrisham. The investigation involves the close-knit fishing community and their relationship to the coastguard and maritime authorities.

3. The Rising Tide (2022) A reunion of schoolfriends on Holy Island, off the Northumberland coast, ends when one of them is found dead. The novel moves territory between Two Rivers and Vera country, and again connects the three series in ways that reward readers familiar with the broader landscape Cleeves has constructed over the years.

Which Series to Start With

The three Cleeves series are entirely independent of each other and can be read in any order, or only one may appeal to you entirely. The choice between them is genuinely a matter of what you want from crime fiction.

Start with Vera if character psychology is what draws you to crime fiction. Vera Stanhope is one of the most fully realised protagonists in British crime — complex, sometimes difficult to like, internally contradictory in ways that feel true rather than constructed. The Northumberland setting is compelling but secondary to the character. If you came to the books through the television series, starting with The Crow Trap will show you how much of Brenda Blethyn’s characterisation was already present on the page.

Start with Shetland if you want landscape-driven fiction and atmosphere above all else. Raven Black is the correct answer to the question of which single Cleeves book to read first — it is the Gold Dagger winner, it is the book where all her instincts align most perfectly, and the Shetland setting is unlike anything else in British crime fiction. Jimmy Perez is a quieter, more interior protagonist than Vera, and the Shetland novels are more elegiac in tone. They reward attention in a way that is not quite the same as the Vera books’ sharper engagement.

Start with Two Rivers if you want crime fiction that engages explicitly with contemporary social questions — sexuality, religion, community belonging, the particular pressures of rural communities in the present rather than a generalised British past. The Long Call is the most accessible entry point to Cleeves’s work for readers coming from literary fiction rather than from genre, and it is the shortest series, which makes it easier to read in its entirety.

What Makes Ann Cleeves Different

Three qualities recur in any serious discussion of Cleeves’s work, and they are worth naming.

Landscape as character. Cleeves is not the first writer to use setting as more than backdrop — P.D. James did it, Josephine Tey did it — but she is unusually disciplined about it. The moors, islands, and estuaries of her fiction are not decorative. They shape what is possible, what is concealed, and who her protagonists are. Jimmy Perez is a product of Shetland in a way that a character transplanted to another setting would not survive; Vera Stanhope is Northumberland in human form. This is a harder thing to achieve than it looks.

Working-class and community-rooted protagonists. Both Vera and Jimmy Perez are unusual among crime fiction detectives for their deep roots in the communities they police. Vera is not a middle-class professional who commutes to crime scenes; she is part of the social fabric of Northumberland, connected to it through her father’s past and her own decades of work. This groundedness produces a kind of moral authority — and a kind of moral complication — that detectives with no personal stake in a place cannot achieve.

Moral complexity without nihilism. Cleeves’s novels do not resolve into the satisfaction of a puzzle solved and order restored. They tend to leave their readers with an understanding of how a crime happened that involves sympathy for nearly everyone involved — including, sometimes, the person who committed it. This is not relativism or the fashionable amoralism of some contemporary crime fiction; it is a recognition that most crimes occur within webs of circumstance and relationship that simple judgement cannot adequately address.

What to Read After Ann Cleeves

If the Shetland novels’ psychological depth and landscape-driven atmosphere have drawn you in, Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series is the natural next read — a crime series that shares Cleeves’s commitment to place as character and to protagonists who are in some sense undone by the cases they investigate.

For readers who loved the village-and-community dimension of Vera, Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache series is the most obvious recommendation — equally serious about character, equally committed to a specific place as the moral centre of its investigations.

If cosy British crime is the appeal — the village setting, the community mystery, the amateur detective variant of the form — our guide to the best cosy mystery books covers the essential titles across the subgenre, including writers who share Cleeves’s interest in atmosphere and character over procedural detail.

For the Best True Crime Books

For the best true crime books — from In Cold Blood to contemporary investigative narrative — see our Best True Crime Books list.

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