Cold Earth - Ann Cleeves

During Magnus Tait's funeral a landslide sweeps down the hill &, along with headstones & grave markers, destroys a nearby croft. Inspector Jimmy Perez is attending the funeral & decides to take a look at the seemingly abandoned croft. He's surprised to find a woman's body among the debris & even more surprised to discover that the forensic evidence points to murder rather than accidental death. The croft, Tain, had belonged to Minnie Laurenson &, after her death, her American niece had inherited the property. Apart from the occasional holiday let, the croft was empty & the identity of the woman proves hard to track down. The only clue is a letter addressed to Alis & a belt that may be the murder weapon. Local landowners Jane & Kevin Hay were Minnie's closest neighbours but polytunnels & trees obscure their view. Perez calls in Chief Inspector Willow Reeves from Inverness to lead the investigation & the team's first priority is to discover the identity of the victim.

Jimmy & Willow have worked together before & their friendship is tinged with a tentative attraction that both of them recognise but are unwilling to explore. Jimmy is still grieving for his fiancée, Fran, & he's caring for Fran's daughter, Cassie. He returned to Shetland some years before & knows the benefits & disadvantages of a tight-knit community when it comes to a murder investigation. The first clues to the victim's identity point to a happy, attractive woman buying champagne for a special Valentine's Day dinner but then another witness, Simon Agnew, comes forward & describes a visit from the same woman to his counselling drop-in service where she had been distraught & despairing. When the team discovers that the woman was using a false identity & that she had ties to Shetland going back some years, they need to find out who could have stayed in contact with her & what brought her back to the island. A second murder close to the scene of the first complicates the investigation & leads to suspicion & mistrust as the victim's private life is exposed.

The Shetland series is one of my favourites (links to my previous reviews are here). Originally a quartet of novels - Raven Black, White Nights, Red Bones, Blue Lightning - but the success of the quartet led to more Shetland novels - Dead Water, Thin Air & now Cold Earth. The Shetland setting is one of the strengths of the books. A remote, relatively closed community (although less so since the expansion of the oil & gas companies) is a classic setting for mystery novels & Ann Cleeves makes the most of the connections between families that result from living in such close proximity. Jimmy Perez is an enigmatic man who has had enough time away from Shetland to be mistrusted by some but it's also given him perspective which is valuable in his work. In a way Jimmy is the typical loner detective, self-contained & melancholy, but he's a more well-rounded character than the stereotype implies. Sergeant Sandy Wilson, who has lived on Shetland all his life, lacks confidence & looks to Jimmy for reassurance. His familiarity with the people & the place is both an asset & a burden but Jimmy has learnt how to work with Sandy to bring out the best in him.

All the characters are interesting & memorable, no matter how small a part they play in the story, like the observant young cashier at the supermarket who grabs any excuse for a cigarette & a coffee break to talk to Sandy to Rogerson's business partner, Paul Taylor, with his frazzled wife & three small sons. Jane Hay is a recovering alcoholic who is starting to feel restless in her gratitude to her husband for supporting her & worried about her son, Andy, who has dropped out of university & is back home, silent & uncommunicative. Jane's husband, Kevin, works hard but is unsettled by something or someone. Local councilor, solicitor Tom Rogerson seems successful but some of his decisions on the Council have upset locals & his family - wife Mavis & daughter Kathryn, the local schoolteacher - seem unaware of the rumours about his womanising.

I read Cold Earth so fast that, as usual, I had no idea about the identity of the murderer, even as Jimmy & Willow were racing towards the solution. I love a police procedural where all the steps of the investigation are laid out. There are flashes of intuition but most of the work is a hard slog, often frustrating but with enough clues to keep the detectives hoping & the readers reading along at a breakneck pace. I'm assuming that there will be a final novel in this second quartet with Fire in the title & I can't wait!

Shetland - Ann Cleeves

I'm a big fan of Ann Cleeves' Shetland novels. If you click on the link for Ann Cleeves in my labels list on the right >>>, you'll see all my reviews. I also enjoyed the TV series even though Douglas Henshall wasn't initially my idea of Jimmy Perez.  He's grown on me though! The second series is on UK TV at the moment so I hope we see it here in Australia at some stage. Martin Edwards has reviewed it here & he includes a link to an interesting article by Cleeves in The Guardian about violence on TV.

With an interest in the books & a fascination with the Shetlands, this gorgeous coffee table book was irresistible. As well as the most beautiful photography (by a number of photographers), Ann Cleeves writes about her own connection to the Shetlands, her first visit years ago when she took a job as cook at the bird observatory on Fair Isle, meeting her husband & the many trips since then. She also describes the landscape, flora & fauna & the different characteristics of the many small islands that make up the Shetland group of islands. The varied bird life in particular attracts a lot of tourists & the bird observatory was the scene of the murder in Blue Lightning, the first Shetland novel I read (even though it was the last book in the first Quartet).

I love reading about writers' inspiration, how they come up with their ideas & Cleeves describes the moments when the plots of some of her novels were born. She also talks about the filming of the TV series & how she takes the production crew on trips to look at locations & give them a feel for the landscape. Certainly, Shetland itself is one of the stars of the TV series, so she has definitely managed to inspire the producers of the series with her own love of the islands.

Some coffee table books are beautiful to look at but the text is pretty bland. This book is an exception as Ann Cleeves manages to combine the kind of information tourists want to know (she describes the Up Helly Aa fire festival & the midsummer music festivals) with descriptions of wildlife & landscape as well as the history of the islands. She also describes the ways that the locals are looking to the future with tourism taking over from the oil rigs as a source of income with the fishing industry as a constant throughout Shetland's history. Unlike many coffee table books, I read every word of this one. If you're a fan of the books or the TV series, you'll enjoy Shetland.

Thin Air - Ann Cleeves

Three women who have been friends since university travel to Unst in Shetland when one of them, Caroline, marries Lowrie Malcolmson, a Shetlander. The wedding has already taken place but the traditional Shetland welcome for the married couple, the hamefarin', is a chance for the locals to have a party. Polly Gilmour has invited her new partner, Marcus Wentworth, & Eleanor Longstaff & her husband Ian, make up the group. Eleanor has been depressed after suffering two miscarriages & is resentful that Ian seems to be lacking in sympathy. She's a television producer with a small company & is currently researching ghost stories for a program about the phenomenon of practical people believing they've seen something supernatural. Polly is the quiet one of the three friends, always following where the others lead. She's a librarian, working at a special library dedicated to folklore. Caroline is a decisive woman who set her sights on Lowrie from their university days & now has what she's always wanted. She's even considering moving to Unst permanently.

The hamefarin' is a big success with nearly everyone on the island there. Eleanor surprises her friends late that night by saying that she's seen the ghost of a little girl, Peerie Lizzie, who had drowned 80 years before. The Peerie Lizzie story is one of those she's researching for her program & the legend is that if a woman sees the child she will become pregnant. Polly has also seen the girl but says nothing out of fear of ridicule. Next morning, Eleanor has disappeared. The police are called in & then Polly receives a text message from Eleanor saying that there's no point looking for her as she won't be found. Has Eleanor's fragile mental health been shaken by the sight of a ghost? Has she committed suicide or just run away? When her body is found on the shore, laid out very carefully, it's clear that she's been murdered.

Detectives Jimmy Perez & Sandy Wilson arrive from Lerwick to investigate Eleanor's disappearance which soon becomes a murder inquiry. They're joined by Willow Reeves, another islander whose style of working, abrupt & very focused, contrasts with Perez's calm watchfulness. The two have a cordial working relationship but Jimmy is still recovering from the murder of his partner, Fran, & believes that Willow is on the lookout for any sign that he's not up to the job. Willow is only too aware of Jimmy but her attraction to him annoys her & makes her seem unsympathetic.

The detectives stay at an upmarket B&B run by Charles Hillier & David Gordon. Charles had been a  well-known magician but his career had dried up & his partner, David, suggested they move to Shetland. The renovation of the B&B had been expensive & there are tensions & secrets between the couple that become obvious as the investigation continues. The relationship between Eleanor, Polly & Caroline also proves to be more complex than it first seemed. Eleanor had been the leader of the group, dominating the more introverted Polly, who becomes more & more frightened as the atmosphere on the island becomes claustrophobic & her own sightings of a little girl dancing on the beach who seems to vanish into thin air.

The Shetland series is one of my favourites. I'm not reading as many police procedurals as I used to, but this is one series that I always look forward to. The atmosphere of the island is beautifully evoked. The ghost story of Peerie Lizzie adds to the feeling of otherworldliness that is intensified by the midsummer simmer dim, the time when night never really seems to fall. The arrival of the visitors recalls memories & events long past & Eleanor's research into the story of Peerie Lizzie may have stirred up more than she expected. I love the way Ann Cleeves brings in so many possibilities & creates characters with whole lives behind them. Every twist & turn of the investigation brought some new perspective to the lives of one of the suspects. She's also very good at involving the reader in the lives of her detectives. I thought I knew the identity of the murderer several times but was wrong almost to the end when I did get an inkling.

Jimmy Perez is one of the most interesting, sympathetic detectives in crime fiction. Still grieving over the loss of Fran, he's also caring for Fran's daughter, Cassie, while trying to get on with his life & his work. He's an instinctive investigator, who sometimes goes off on a tangent of his own but his knowledge of the people & the islands is invaluable. I've just watched the TV series Shetland that was based on the books. I enjoyed it, loved the scenery & the music. It didn't bother me that Douglas Henshall, who plays Jimmy, is a pale skinned redhead rather than a dark descendant of the Spanish Armada as Jimmy is described in the books. Some changes have been made to the plots of the books they used but a TV series has to be different & I thought they did a good job. I believe a third series is planned. I'm sure it's done wonders for tourism in the islands.

Dead Water - Ann Cleeves

Journalist Jerry Markham returns to Shetland, telling his parents that he's on the track of a big story. A story about the future of the offshore gas & oil industry at Sullum Voe, under attack from environmentalists & locals worried about the future once the industry has gone. When Jerry is found murdered, laid out in a boat near the home of Rhona Laing, the Procurator Fiscal, the assumption is that it must be connected to his work.

Jerry left Shetland years before. His parents, Maria & Peter, own a luxury hotel on the island but Jerry had rarely returned home. He left few friends behind & he had been involved in scandal when Evie Watt, a student working at the hotel, became pregnant. Now, Evie is engaged to John Henderson, & seems to have put her unhappy relationship with Jerry behind her. Jerry had left
Evie behind without a second glance but on this trip he tries to contact her. Could Jerry's past hold the key to his death rather than his search for a story?

Inspector Jimmy Perez hasn't returned to full time work since his fiance Fran was murdered six months before. He's finding it hard to recover from the guilt he feels over Fran's death & only her daughter, Cassie, who Jimmy cares for, provides a reason to keep going. Jimmy's sergeant, Sandy Wilson, is adrift without his boss but doesn't know how to help. When Jerry Markham's body is found, D I Willow Reeves is sent from Inverness to head the investigation. Willow grew up on a commune in the Hebrides although this doesn't make her any less of an outsider on Shetland, what ever her boss might think. This is her first chance to head a murder enquiry & she's desperate to do well. Almost against his will, Jimmy is drawn into the investigation. His local knowledge is invaluable & Reeves is keen to include him in the team. Gradually Jimmy, Sandy & Willow work through the connections between the Markhams, Evie Watt & her family, drawing in Rhona Laing as well as Jerry's London life, to find his murderer.

This is a terrific book. I loved the Shetland Quartet & I was so pleased that Ann Cleeves decided to write a second quartet of which Dead Water is the first part. I love books set in Scotland & the atmosphere of Shetland & the other island communities is perfectly captured in these books. Jimmy Perez is an intriguing character, with his Spanish ancestry & his self-contained manner. His intuitive methods of investigation & his local knowledge of the people he lives among make him an excellent detective. It's interesting to see him in this book coming out of the worst of his grief over Fran's death & rejoining the world. I hope there's a chance to see more of Willow Reeves in future books too. I haven't seen the TV version of Shetland. A pilot was made & a series has now been commissioned. Much as I like Douglas Henshall, he's not my idea of dark, brooding Jimmy Perez but I'd love to see what he does with the role.

Ann Cleeves has been writing for many years but I only discovered her through the Shetland novels. Her other well-known series featuring Vera Stanhope has also been made into a TV series starring Brenda Blethyn. I've read one of the Vera books & will get to the others one of these days.  Bello have recently reissued earlier series featuring Inspector Ramsay (set in Northumbria) & bird watchers George & Molly Palmer-Jones, as e-books so most of Ann Cleeves's work must now be available again.

Silent Voices - Ann Cleeves

I've just finished Ann Cleeves's latest, Silent Voices. I really enjoyed the Shetland Quartet which I discovered last year, long after every other mystery fan had read them. Silent Voices features Cleeves’s other series character, Vera Stanhope. Vera is another loner cop. Overweight, unhealthy, lonely, she lives in the house her father left her but he seems to have taken delight in putting her down so her self-esteem is pretty low. Except at work where she knows she's a great detective.

Vera's doctor tells her to lose weight so she joins a health club at a local hotel & swims laps. When she finds a dead woman in the sauna, Vera & her team investigate. Jenny Lister was a social worker who seemed to have no enemies but she did have a connection to a notorious case when a woman drowned her son. Was her death related to the case? As Vera & her team investigate further, it also seems that there could be a connection with the health club where Jenny died. Security at the club was very lax & several suspects were there on the day of the murder.

Another subplot also explores the aftermath of the child abuse case. Mattie Jones had drowned her son because her boyfriend had left her. She was so besotted with this man that she thought he would come back to her if her son was gone. The man has a history of choosing younger, vulnerable women & when Jenny Lister discovers that he is living with another young woman, she may have tried to interfere & roused his anger. Then there’s Connie, the young social worker supervising Mattie who lost her job & after little Elias died. Connie was pilloried in the media after Mattie's trial & she & her daughter have endured the gossip & the loneliness of being ostracised. Did she resent Jenny’s role in her dismissal? When Vera discovers that Connie now lives in the same village as Jenny Lister, she thinks she’s found motive & opportunity. But has she?

Vera's a great character. She’s funny, direct, vulnerable, can’t delegate, & alternately infuriates & inspires her DS, Joe Ainsworth. Silent Voices is an involving novel with enough subplots & shady characters to keep the reader guessing until the end. I'd like to read the earlier books in the series & I hope we get to see the recent TV series, Vera, starring Brenda Blethyn.

Red Bones - Ann Cleeves

Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Quartet was one of my discoveries last year. Even though I read the books out of order (see my reviews of Raven Black, White Nights & Blue Lightning), it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of this excellent mystery series. I’ve now read the third book in the series, Red Bones, & I’m eager to read more of Ann Cleeves’s books. I have her latest novel, Silent Voices, on the tbr pile. This is one of the Vera Stanhope series & a new TV series starring Blenda Blethyn as Vera has been filmed & will be shown on UK television this year.

I love the atmosphere of the Shetland novels. Red Bones is set on Whalsay, a small island community that is also the home of Sandy Wilson, policeman & offsider to Inspector Jimmy Perez. When Sandy’s grandmother, Mima, is shot by a neighbour out shooting rabbits on a foggy night, it seems to be a tragic accident. Mima’s husband had been a fisherman, like most of the Whalsay men, & had been drowned many years before. She lived alone & looked after her croft, Setter, with the help of her son & his wife, Evelyn. Two young archaeologists, Hattie & Sophie, had recently arrived to work on a dig on Mima’s land. Hattie, an intense young woman, was working on her PhD thesis that there had been a merchant’s house there in the 15th century. When human remains are found on the site, Hattie is thrilled to think that this may prove the age of the site & the status of the owner. Mima seems more disturbed by the find.

Ronald Clouston, the young man who was out shooting on the night Mima died, had been a little drunk after an argument with his wife, Anna, just home after giving birth to their first child. He’s devastated by the thought that his reckless behaviour killed Mima & falls to pieces while Anna, an outsider trying to set up a craft business on Whalsay, becomes more & more exasperated with his weakness.

Ann Cleeves sets up the relationships & tensions among the families on Whalsay so well. Ronald Clouston & Sandy Wilson grew up together. Their mothers, Evelyn & Jackie, are sisters & rivals. Jackie Clouston married into a rich fishing family while the Wilsons were less prosperous. Evelyn is a managing woman & she is determined that the archaeological finds will turn Whalsay into a tourist destination. She had a tense relationship with her mother-in-law, & now that her husband owns Setter, she wants to create a heritage centre there. Sandy Wilson isn’t the cleverest policemen in the service & he’s devastated by his grandmother’s death & eager to hand over to his boss, Perez, who comes in to investigate. Perez uses Sandy’s knowledge of the islanders to good effect in his investigations, especially when he begins to suspect that Mima’s death wasn’t accidental & there could have been someone else out shooting that night.

I suspected just about everyone as the story progressed. The story encompasses the distant past of the archaeological dig, the activities of the local fishermen during WWII when they helped ferry equipment & men to Norway to fight the Nazis & more recent events. Red Bones is a perfect mix of mystery, atmosphere & intriguing characters with a very satisfying twist at the end.

White nights - Ann Cleeves

Martin Edwards was discussing the pros & cons of reading a mystery series from the first book through to the end on his blog recently. Does it really matter if we jump in at Book 5 or 15? Some series, the classic puzzle type of mystery for instance, had very little character development so it didn’t matter where you started, the detective was very much the same. Modern detective series involve a much greater investment from the reader & we expect more than a cardboard cutout for a detective. I know I become fond of my favourite detectives, their colleagues & families. I want an update on Reg & Dora Wexford & their daughters or Kinsey Millhone & her neighbours. I’m on tenterhooks about the relationship between Daniel Kind & Hannah Scarlett in Martin Edwards’s Lake District series & I’m always happy to catch up with Wes Peterson & his boss Gerry Heffernan in Kate Ellis’s books. If the author is doing their job properly a new reader will soon find out all they need to know about a protagonist without regular readers becoming bored with the repetition of basic facts. Of course, it can be a little disconcerting to read the last book in a series first where there’s a dramatic climax to the stories of several major characters & then go back to the beginning & pick up Book 1.

Well, that’s what I’ve done with Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Quartet. I read the last book, Blue Lightning, first. I loved it so I went back to the beginning & read Raven Black. I’ve just finished White Nights & I have Red Bones on the tbr pile. Knowing the end of the story hasn’t spoiled the enjoyment of the earlier books. This is a wonderful series. Ann Cleeves deserves all the awards & praise she has won. The plots are great but, for me, it’s the setting & Detective Jimmy Perez that are so beguiling.

Shetland is a major character in these books. The weather, the landscape, the way of life of people who have lived there all their lives & the visitors & incomers who have just arrived. In White Nights, it’s summer. The sun never quite sets & in the white nights, people go a little crazy. Jimmy Perez attends the opening of an exhibition at a gallery, the herring House, in Biddista, a small village. Bella Sinclair, local identity & famous artist is exhibiting along with Fran Hunter. Fran & Jimmy’s relationship has moved from detective & witness in the first book to friendship & now, they’re ready to take the next step. Fran is English, divorced & living in Ravenswick with her daughter, Cassie. At the gallery, a stranger walks in, looks at some of the pictures, then collapses sobbing on the floor. Jimmy tries to find out who he is but he has no ID & he vanishes.

Next morning, the stranger is found hanging in a nearby shed. It looks like suicide, but the doctor confirms that it’s murder. Jimmy’s investigations are helped & hindered by the fact that he’s a local. He grew up on Fair Isle so he knows these people. The few families living in the area close ranks & Jimmy finds it hard going. His frustrations include having to work with a team from Inverness, led by Roy Taylor, an abrasive Liverpudlian who left his family’s expectations behind to join the police force & move as far away from home as possible. Taylor & Perez have worked together before & have a wary friendship. Taylor is frustrated by Jimmy’s slow, careful way of investigating but has to admit that he would get nowhere on his own. When a second murder is committed, Perez realises that the solution lies in the past.

I think anyone who enjoys a classic murder mystery would love this series. I was probably the last mystery reader in the world to catch up with Ann Cleeves but now I’m sorry I only have one more Shetland novel to read.

Raven black - Ann Cleeves

Raven Black is the first book in Ann Cleeves’s Shetland Quartet. I read the last book in the series first & I reviewed Blue Lightning here. I’ve now gone back to the beginning & read book one.

This is a terrifically atmospheric murder mystery set on Shetland. A beautiful young girl, Catherine Ross, is found murdered, lying in the snow with ravens circling her body. There are several suspects. A reclusive old man, Duncan Tait, is the last to admit seeing Catherine & he has been shunned by the community since he was suspected of involvement in the disappearance of another girl years before. Catherine’s father, Euan, has been distracted since the death of his wife & seems headed for a breakdown. Catherine’s teacher, Michael Scott, was attracted to her & there are several other young men who were obsessed by her intelligence & beauty. Then there’s Fran Hunter who found the body & had employed Catherine as a babysitter. Jimmy Perez is the detective, a Shetland native who has come back to the islands after his marriage ended. He’s a sympathetic character who manages to hold his own when the detectives from Inverness arrive to lead the investigation. The atmosphere & the place are the stars in this book. It’s January, bitterly cold, there’s a real sense of dread that murder has come to the island. It was great to go back to the beginning of the series & see how Jimmy began the journey that ends in Blue Lightning.

Abby, hot cross buns & reading progress

I've spent the morning making hot cross buns. They're on to the second rising now & I have the cross mixture all ready to pipe on & then pop them into the oven. I love making hot cross buns. The dough smells so delicious, I use lots of spices & it's a lovely dough to knead. These have become an Easter tradition at work so we'll be enjoying them for morning tea tomorrow. Unfortunately I've had a camera malfunction - actually, I think the camera's had it, - so I can't post a photo of the actual buns. My friend P is coming over tomorrow to finish installing my new water tank so he will have a look at the camera as well. It was only cheap as I didn't think I'd need a camera very often. Well, blogging has changed my mind. I love taking photos of Abby & the garden & my cooking, so, if the camera has died, I'll be out next week looking for a new one. So, the photo above is not authentic but gives an idea of what my buns look like. I wish you could smell them!

The camera problems also mean I don't have a picture of Abby in her new purple sparkly collar. Actually it was while I was trying to get a shot of her in the collar yesterday that the camera gave up the ghost. So, here are a couple of photos from earlier in the summer.

I'm halfway through two terrific books. Tracy Borman's Elizabeth's women & Ann Cleeves's Black raven which is the first in the Shetland Quartet. Perversely, I started with the last book in the series which I loved & reviewed here. I'll be getting back to both books after lunch.

Blue lightning - Ann Cleeves

I must be the last mystery fan in the world to have caught up with Ann Cleeves’ Shetland Quartet and even now, I’ve started at the end. I’d been aware of the books & I’d even picked up one of the earlier books in the series but it wasn’t the right time & I put it down again & went on to something else. Well, after reading Blue Lightning I have to read the earlier books as soon as possible & probably anything else by Ann Cleeves that I can get my hands on! Blue Lightning is in the great Golden Age tradition of the locked room mystery & the Shetland Islands are a wonderfully atmospheric setting. Detective Jimmy Perez is on his way to his parents’ home on Fair Isle with his fiancé, Fran. Jimmy would like to make his home on Fair Isle, where he grew up, but Fran is still unsure about moving herself & her daughter to such a remote place. Fair Isle is the location of a bird observatory run by Maurice & Angela Moore. Angela is the ranger, a beautiful, commanding woman who has presented TV documentaries & is famous for her discoveries. Maurice is much older, an academic who left his job when his relationship with Angela broke up his marriage & alienated his children. His daughter, Poppy, is reluctantly visiting the island but obviously resents being there. Jane Latimer has escaped an unhappy personal life to be the cook/housekeeper at the observatory, catering for the regular staff & the birdwatchers who come to observe some of Britain’s rarest species. Jimmy & Fran arrive as a spell of bad weather cuts the island off from the mainland. When Angela is found murdered, stabbed in the back at her desk with feathers strewn over her, Jimmy has to investigate without any of the usual backup or forensic support. The suspects all have something to hide & the investigation brings out the obsessive, competitive nature of twitching. These people are so obsessed with being the one to stop the next rare bird that Angela’s death is seen as more of an inconvenience than a tragedy. Angela had plenty of secrets of her own & once Jimmy is able to get his team to the island, the investigation spreads further afield & uncovers several juicy motives. This is a terrific book full of atmosphere, compelling characters & an intelligent detective. It’s been a while since I found a new mystery writer but I can’t wait to read the rest of the Shetland Quartet. I hope this isn’t the last we’ll see of Jimmy Perez even though the Quartet is finished. Ann Cleeves has written an interesting piece on the origins of the story on Martin Edwards’s blog here & Martin has also reviewed Blue Lightning here. I recommend it to anyone who enjoys British mysteries & all I can say is what took me so long?