Whenever I start one of these, I check how many pages I’m in for. 385 here. On the hefty side. Worrying. Then I breezed through the first 100 or so without noticing them going. Less worrying. Good, in fact. Well written, well paced, a smooth read. And so it went on.
The setting is Shetland in January. The case is murder: a teenage girl, dead on a hill, local suspicion falling on Magnus Tait, a “simpleton” also suspected but never charged in a similar case several years ago. The leading police officer, Jimmy Perez, can’t quite see it, but can’t quite see who else either, so tries to make the case against Tait while also attempting to chip away at it.
Cleeves doesn’t make it easy for herself here. The setting invites brooding, making heavy weather of the weather. It also encourages exploration of the theme of outsiders and insiders, Shetland natives and mainland immigrants. Cleeves does both. She also maintains a line of thematic symbolism concerning those titular ravens and their colour. And she also switches point of view frequently. We look over the shoulder of many characters, not least Tait.
That’s plenty to be getting on with, and plenty that could go wrong. Setting, theme, and symbolism could all easily be overdone. Writing a “simpleton” is a tricksy business, obviously, as it switching so often between characters: maintain their voices, maintain differentiation, but keep the thing coherent. And of course you have to remember you’re actually writing a murder mystery, and hustle the case along.
Mostly, Cleeves does this really really well. Nothing is done to excess, the characters are very well drawn and voiced, the whole lot hangs together. Especially good: plenty of suggestively slightly shady men are introduced, never as focal suspects, just out of view, all tempting the reader to jump to a conclusion. Two-thirds through, you could suspect any one of several people, and not have much grounds beyond suggestion for any of them. The exception is Tait, who clearly didn’t do it, not least because he’s the sole obvious suspect.
The one complaint you could have is that the resolution arrives via a piece of misdirection that might have you claiming a foul. We’ve been steered a little too far from the answer by authorial sleight of hand that arguably breaks the rules of murder mystery fair play. I’m being vague here because I don’t want to spoil a book I’d recommend, but I’d be interested to see how Cleeve resolves her other mysteries; what she does here, I think you can only get away with once if you want to avoid being seen as a one-trick writer. Well worth seeing the trick done once though.