by Ann Cleeves
Part of Shetland, book 7
First published 2017
A winter landslide tears through a croft on a Shetland hillside, and Jimmy Perez is there to see it. He has come to bury his old friend Magnus Tait when the mud and peaty water come crashing down. Inside the wreckage, he finds a woman in a red silk dress, dark-haired, already dead before the slide hit. Nobody knows who she is. Nobody admits she was ever there. Perez feels a pull toward her that goes beyond duty. Something in her face connects to his own Mediterranean roots, and he cannot let her go unnamed. The only objects recovered from the house are a wooden box holding two photographs and a handwritten letter that opens with the words "My dearest Alis." One photo shows two small children. The other shows an elderly couple. No names. No context. As the Shetland winter closes in, Perez works to trace a woman who left almost nothing behind. The mystery of who she was and how she died sits at the center of this novel, but underneath it runs a quieter question about what it means to belong to a place and a people.
Genres: literary-fiction, mystery, crime, contemporary, detective
Vibes: atmospheric, contemplative, haunting, introspective, melancholic, suspenseful
Tropes: isolated-setting, mystery-investigation, personal-connection-to-case, unreliable-clues
Setting: Shetland, Shetland Islands
Period: winter, contemporary
387 pages · Paperback · PAN
Content warnings: death, murder