After several years, Ann Cleeves has brought back DI Jimmy Perez!

DI Perez has left Shetland and settled into his new home in the Orkney Islands, with his partner in crime and in life, Willow Reeves, and they’re expecting a baby. After a wild storm, Archie Stout, a local personality and Perez’s childhood friend, is found bludgeoned to death, and the clues seem to link to the local museum. Perez finds it hard to stop his feelings clouding his logic, but Reeves is on hand to keep things by the book.

This book is both the 9th book in the Shetland series and the 1st in a new series featuring Perez and Reeves solving crimes together. The story shifts between the two of them, in two plot threads, where each is in a different part of the Orkney’s doing different aspects of the job. I liked this as a way of structuring the story and it sets it apart from other of Ann Cleeves series. I’ve watched the Shetland TV series and I enjoyed it, and I thought I’d read one of the books in this series before, but I realise that I haven’t!

Of course, Ann Cleeves is an old hand at detective stories by this point, and her different series are all very popular. She captures a sense of place really well. Of landscape and climate, but also of locality and way of life: the way people speak and think in these places, of the smallness of the community. This book is set on Westray, a small island of generational farmers and fishermen, a very close knit community, just before Christmas. It’s a wild, remote landscape, and Winter itself becomes a bit of a key player here. The ancient landscape lends itself well to a story that has an archeological bent to it and old local traditions and knowledge.

The plot is very detailed and twisty. Each time the story takes us one direction, we’re stymied by some new development that means that we’ve just been fed another red herring. I really liked this, and enjoyed sinking into this story, but the problem comes at the end: it seems that the author has painted herself into a corner, who can the killer be? It seems very out of left field when we find out. Without giving anything away, it feels like the author has just picked someone and shoe horned it in. It’s a character we know almost nothing about and you couldn’t have known it was them from clues left in the book. Their motive feels like a current social concern, rather than something built into the book. It felt odd and a bit disappointing.

Also, the issue at the core of the ending, the reason the person did it, feels really oddly handled. Perez feels sad about the ending, because it’s a person he knows, and the attitude seems to be that the person is just misguided in some way. There’s no horror about the impact on the victims and how what they did was actually really disturbing. For him to do what he does, he would have to be a sociopath.

I also was left wondering why Perez liked Archie. They have completely different morals and values, and while I do understand they were thrown together growing up because it’s a small village, etc, but by the end, you realise Archie was a bit of a creeper and incredibly selfish. The friendship makes no sense.

On the whole, the book was entertaining through the main part of it, but the ending was weak and felt tacked on or like the author couldn’t figure out an ending that worked. Not Cleeves best book, but still nice to have Perez back.

Read It If: you’ve been missing Det Perez or are a Cleeves fan. It’s not bad overall, but the ending doesn’t work.

Thank you to PGC Books for the ARC of this book for review.