Through Sally’s eyes we see the life of youngsters on the island, socially and at school. Cleeves does a great job of making the reader find him both creepy and rather sad at the same time. Magnus is very well done – he is a man with what we’d probably call learning difficulties, able to function but well aware that he lacks social skills. Up Helly Aa – when the Shetlanders celebrate their Viking connections by burning a longboat… This lets us see events from different angles, gradually giving a rounder picture of the victim and the various suspects.
Being in the third person past tense, the reader is allowed to see the story develop from a variety of perspectives, including Perez himself as he investigates, Magnus Tait as he waits knowing that the finger of suspicion will be pointed in his direction, and Sally, daughter of a teacher at the local school and Catherine’s best friend. The plotting is excellent, as Perez tries to work out whether the two cases are linked or separate. She also shows how old traditions remain side by side with the increasing modernisation of life, as the islanders prepare for the big annual festival of Up Helly Aa perhaps not as ancient a festival as some like to believe, but one that has become a part of life and a major tourist attraction over the years. She captures the atmosphere of the island beautifully – the mixture of that feeling of claustrophobia where everyone knows everyone else’s secrets and the isolation of the small villages outside the main harbour town. This is the first novel in Cleeves’ Shetland series, the books behind the successful TV series of the same name. But Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, another outsider, isn’t convinced… She was known to have been in Magnus’ company a couple of times, so his guilt seems certain. And Catherine was interested in people, and perhaps a little cruel sometimes. Catherine Ross was an outsider, though, her father having brought her to the island just recently, after the death of her mother. That child disappeared and her body was never found, and no evidence was found to allow the police to charge Magnus with the crime, but ever since the islanders have kept their children well away from him. The islanders immediately jump to the conclusion that she was killed by Magnus Tait, an elderly loner who has long been convicted in the public mind of the murder of another girl several years earlier. A few days after New Year, sixteen-year-old Catherine Ross is found strangled in the snow in the middle of a field.
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