by Ann Cleeves
First published 2019
Helena Fleming and her husband Daniel have moved their family to the far north of Shetland, chasing a clean break. Helena is a designer, Daniel an architect, and together they imagined this isolated community as a place to start over. The locals see it differently. Resentment builds quietly at first, then faster. Someone begins leaving Helena small drawings of a gallows and a hanged man. Gossip moves through the community the way fire moves through dry grass. Inspector Jimmy Perez is called in. He knows Shetland's rhythms, its silences, the way old grievances live just beneath the surface of neighborly faces. What he finds as he digs into the Flemings' arrival is a tangle of dysfunctional families and relationships that broke long before Helena ever taped a drawing to her door. Wild Fire is the eighth and final case for Perez, closing out Ann Cleeves's Shetland Island series. The television adaptation starring Douglas Henshall brought the islands to a wide audience, but the books have always carried their own cold, specific weight. This one leaves Perez and the reader standing in the same bleak northern light, asking the same hard questions about belonging and blame.
Genres: mystery, crime, contemporary, adult-fiction, british-literature, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, bleak, dark, gritty, introspective, suspenseful
Tropes: fish-out-of-water, investigation-reveals-secrets, outsiders-in-community, unreliable-community
Setting: Shetland, Shetland Islands, Northern Scotland
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
398 pages · Paperback · PAN MACMILLAN
Content warnings: death, murder