by Ann Cleeves
Part of Shetland
First published 2014
A group of London friends travel to Unst, the northernmost island in Shetland, to celebrate a wedding. The party ends, the midsummer light stretches across the horizon, and Eleanor is gone. The next morning, her friend Polly opens an email that reads like a goodbye note: Eleanor 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 that Eleanor had not been herself. Before she disappeared, she told the group she had seen a ghost: the spirit of a local child who drowned in the 1920s. Her friends had found the obsession unsettling, a sign of a mind under strain. Perez and Reeves are not so quick to dismiss her. They want to know what Eleanor actually saw, and why it mattered enough to get her killed. Beneath the legend of the drowned child lies something that someone has protected for a very long time. Jimmy and Willow have to decide how far back the truth goes, and how much danger it still carries.
Genres: fiction, mystery, crime, contemporary, thriller, detective
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, gritty, haunting, psychological, suspenseful
Tropes: detective-partnership, past-secrets, unreliable-perception
Setting: Unst, Shetland, London
Period: 1920s, contemporary
330 pages · Kindle Edition · Macmillan
Content warnings: death, murder