by Ann Cleeves
First published 2015
A group of old university friends travel from London to Unst, the northernmost island in Shetland, to celebrate one friend's wedding to a local man. The party ends late, the midsummer sky still pale, and then Eleanor is gone. No one saw her leave. The next morning, her friend Polly opens an email that reads like a suicide note: Eleanor says she will never be found alive. Hours later, Eleanor's body surfaces in a small loch near the cliff edge. Detectives Jimmy Perez and Willow Reeves arrive on Unst to find a group of friends who are frightened and not quite telling the truth. Before she disappeared, Eleanor had become fixated on a local ghost story, the spirit of a child who drowned in the 1920s. Her friends had written it off as a sign of instability. Perez and Reeves are not so sure. The legend feels less like folklore and more like a door someone wants kept shut. Behind it may be a secret old enough and dark enough that killing to protect it still makes sense. Jimmy and Willow have to decide what really happened on that bright northern night before whoever closed that door closes it again.
Genres: fiction, mystery, crime, contemporary, thriller, detective
Vibes: atmospheric, brooding, dark, haunting, psychological, suspenseful
Tropes: group-of-friends, locked-room-mystery, past-secrets, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Unst, Shetland, London
Period: 21st-century, contemporary, midsummer
414 pages · Paperback · Pan Books
Content warnings: death, murder, suicide