2006 mystery; first in Cleeves' Shetland Island series. In a village
near Lerwick, two schoolgirls visit the local mad old man, on a bet.
Five days later, one of them is dead. The old man was blamed, though
not convicted, when a young girl vanished eight years ago and was
never found, so everyone assumes he's done it again; Inspector Jimmy
Perez tries to move beyond the automatic assumption of guilt and find
out what's really happened this time.
Although the book doesn't do that annoying trick of cutting away
to the murderer plotting their crimes, it does have multiple
viewpoints; as well as Jimmy, there's Sally Henry, the other girl,
coping with the loss of her best friend, and Fran Hunter, divorced and
with a small child, who finds the body. And there's Magnus Tait, the
old man, who clearly has substantial cognitive impairments, but has
managed to get along all right… until everyone turns against him.
It's a slow-burn mystery, with a sense of lurking menace in the most
normal things. It has plausible teenagers doing plausible teenage
things, and people taking advantage of them, or is it vice versa (or
both)? It has the slow rhythm of island life in winter. Most
importantly for me it has people, including Perez, who think about the
mystery through the lens of who they are, rather than being
reasoning-machines that jump straight to the right answer.
Perhaps it's too slow in the middle, but it feels as though there's a
constant trickle of new evidence, with theories having to be revised
as one goes. The ending is perhaps a bit abrupt, but there is a sequel
to carry on some of the threads not directly related to the crime.
Followed by White Nights.
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