2008 mystery; second in Cleeves' Shetland Island series. A stranger
turns up at the opening of an art show, and claims to have lost his
memory; later, he's found hanged in a boathouse. DI Jimmy Perez
investigates.
As usual with Cleeves, nobody comes off terribly well here, even
if they don't turn out to be the murderer. However, one obvious
suspect is made more interesting by Perez's awareness of his own
dislike for him: Perez would like him to be the villain, and so has
to be careful not to read too much into the small signs of guilt that
everyone throws off in a story like this.
There's friction again between Perez and Mike Taylor, the senior
policeman from Inverness brought in to run the case; but here it feels
wrong, because Perez and Taylor established a good working
relationship last time (six months ago in their chronology) and I was
surprised that they couldn't pick that up again but rather had to
start from scratch. Still, at least some of the friction is from
Perez' own unwillingness to put himself and his ideas forward, which
is echoed in the slow progress of his relationship with Fran Hunter.
The plot is one of those "shadows from the past" setups that Cleeves
tends to favour, but at least it's not a matter of lots of people
keeping a common secret (which can be desperately annoying). Various
suspicious characters are dropped when they become clearly not part of
the primary investigation, and I'd have liked to know more about their
stories.
The exotic backdrop is used effectively: bodies have to be shipped off
the islands for autopsy, there are only so many ways for someone to
get in or out, and outsiders are thrown by the sub-Arctic summer where
while the sun may have set the sky never really gets dark. I didn't
find there was much sense of location; is the village where the murder
happened a long trip from Lerwick, or can one get there quickly? (All
right, nowhere's really a long way from anywhere on Shetland, but the
main island is some sixty miles long.)
Mind you, if you see a flyer that says "the gallery opening is
cancelled", surely in 2008 the first place you look is at the
gallery's web site to find out more? (I mean, I know I would, but I
also know I'm atypical.)
This isn't my usual sort of mystery – indeed, it's marketed as a
thriller, not that there's a lot of action – and one might argue that
it's not really possible to work out who the killer is, but I still
enjoyed it for the atmosphere and the people. Followed by Red Bones.
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