Tangled Web UK Review May 2008
White Nights by
Anne Cleeves
hbk out March 08
Published by Macmillan
at £16.99
Ann Cleeves’ idea for the Shetland Quartet featuring the appealing cop Jimmy Perez is that each book will be set in a different season of the year. Here the backdrop is summer, the time of the long white nights. The Shetland setting is beautifully done. Few if any modern crime writers convey the essence of a rural community as effectively as Ann Cleeves, and with the islands off the north of Scotland, she is in her element. There is a lot of interesting background detail. I now know what the ‘simmer dim’ is and what ‘singling neeps’ involves, while Raven Black introduced me to the tradition of Up Helly Aa, Europe’s largest fire festival. Reading these novels has made me want to visit Shetland and see the locations for myself (one quibble is that a map would have been a welcome inclusion; I understand that one is due to appear in the American edition.)
This book begins with a mysterious masked man, dressed as a Pierrot, handing out leaflets to tourists arriving at Lerwick from a cruise ship. Then the attention shifts to Perez and his lover Fran, attending an art exhibition at which a stranger falls to his knees and begins to weep. Soon afterwards, local man Kenny Thomson looks into a hut on a jetty and finds a man, dead from hanging. He is wearing the mask of a clown.
Like the late Julian Symons, I’m fascinated by the idea of masks, and the intriguing nature of this plot device was one of the elements that drew me into the book. A second murder soon follows, and the momentum is maintained throughout, whereas the pace in the first hundred pages of Raven Black was rather more leisurely. There are a couple of features of the plot that struck me as a little unlikely, but perhaps legitimate given that the story-line involves performance and playing a part. The great merit of this book is that the people and places are described with such conviction as to ensure that the tale told never becomes unbelievable. This is a first rate crime novel.
(
Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries)
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