How the light gets in (2013) by Louise Penny

For readers unfamiliar with Louise Penny's mystery series, this is #9 with Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. Although this is only my second foray into her Quebec crime series (my first being her last book, BEAUTIFUL MYSTERY), I was impressed with her ability to create multiple plots and weave them together. There's a fresh murder to solve in the town of Three Pines (where some of her series takes place), as well as an arc that started several books ago--the malfeasance of the Sûreté du Québec (police dept). additionally, Armand's close colleague and personal friend, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, is suffering from addiction problems.

HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN takes us back to Three Pines, where I met several quirky/eccentric people for the first time, but am well aware that they are repeating characters, (or sometimes just former ones). Penny does a solid job of bringing new readers into this small village and allowing us to meet the inhabitants naturally and unaffectedly. She doesn't broadcast their histories with awkward exposition, but rather lets pieces of their past unfold with the present events. That takes subtlety and finesse, something that Penny astutely possesses. The truculent poet, Ruth, for example, may be on the periphery of a scene periodically, and then take center stage. Penny juxtaposes scenes and events that progress the various plots and develop the characters with riveting tension.

The murder of septuagenarian, Constance Pineault, who had just recently visited Three Pines bookstore owner, Myrna, brings Gamache back to investigate. This is right before the Christmas holidays, where the deep snow and cold air tends to create gatherings at the warm village bistro. At the same time, Gamache is struggling to keep his decimated homicide department together. He has been undermined by Superintendent Sylvain Françoeur, who has effectively fouled Gamache's reputation and is honing in for the final blow. Armand's relationship with Jean-Guy has also been maimed, thanks to Françoeur and Jean-Guy's torment with his own personal demons.

Penny also devotes ample space to suspenseful cyber hacking, and does it nimbly and accessible to even the low-tech reader. My nails were bitten to the quick! And she demonstrates the truth in human nature, as colleagues claw each other with raw vitriol, and yet show genuine compassion, too.

Treachery; suspense; still voices; moving targets; exquisite plotting--the reader will be satisfied AND nonplussed in equal measure by the end of the book. I don't want to spoil this potent novel for anyone, but I will say that I am glad I read BEAUTIFUL MYSTERY first, because I was already involved before this book began, with a gestating inevitability that has been underpinning much of Gamache's current directives. I am speculating that this is Penny's most heightened and cataclysmic book to date.

As an end note, Penny tells us that the title of this book is based on a Leonard Cohen song called Anthem.

"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering,
There's a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in."

Besides those beautiful words germane to the substance of this book, the title itself is apropos to one of the definitions of anthem: a hymn sung alternately by different sections of a choir or congregation.

A big thank you to Goodreads community commenter, Swittenberg (Betsey) of Goodreads, 2014, for this excellent review.

The Tattooed Girls (2004) by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the world's most respected living novelists. Her new novel brings us a tale of dark passions, prejudice, and the strange forms that love can take.A celebrated but reclusive author, young but in failing health, Joshua Seigl reluctantly realizes that he can no longer live alone. One day he encounters a young woman with synthetic-looking blond hair and pale, tattooed skin in a bookshop. She stirs something unidentifiable within him -- pity? desire? responsibility? He decides that Alma will be his assistant.An uneasy relationship begins, one which lurches between repulsion and attraction, between hate and love. Seigl is unaware that Alma has been shaped by abuse and misfortune. His kindness is baffling to her; his bookishness completely alien. She secretly harbours anti-Semitic thoughts; he quietly nurses his desire. With terrifying inevitability, their stories wind towards a shocking climax as both Alma and Seigl find themselves struggling to understand what their lives are worth.With her unique, masterful balance of dark suspense and surprising tenderness, Joyce Carol Oates conveys how easily and treacherously prejudice can snake its way into human relationships.

Thanks to Goodreads for this review.



The ocean at the end of the lane (2013 ) by Neil Gaiman

Thanks to  BENJAMIN PERCY of The New York Times June 27 for this review

“Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet,” Neil Gaiman writes in his slim, dark dream of a new novel, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane.” “But they are never lost for good.” Who we used to be sometimes seems like a faint shadow of who we are now, but Gaiman helps us remember the wonder and terror and powerlessness that owned us as children.

  

THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE

The novel begins when a man, the narrator, returns to his childhood home in Sussex, England, where he long ago knew a girl named Lettie Hempstock. When he rambles through her farm, when he follows the trail to the duck pond, he might as well be traveling through time. Memories are waiting all around, beckoning him, and when he tosses a hazelnut into the water, the ripples carry across his mind as he remembers “everything.”

First, that he and Lettie used to call the pond the ocean. Anyone who has ever returned to a childhood home after so many years knows how small everything seems now, how outsize everything seemed then. A king bed turns out to be a twin. A cavernous fort turns out to be a cramped, dusty burrow beneath the stairs. An ocean turns out to be a duck pond.

Or maybe not. Maybe it actually is the ocean. And maybe Lettie’s grandmother really can make the moon full every night, maybe she has been alive long enough to have witnessed the Big Bang.

When the narrator remembers his life 40-odd years ago, when he was 7, he remembers magic. A magic first unleashed by a lodger who steals the family car, drives to the end of the lane, runs a hose from the tailpipe to the window and fills his lungs with smoke. The suicide stirs ancient powers, chief among them a nanny named Ursula Monkton, who appears sometimes as a beautiful gray-eyed woman and other times as a “thing” with a face like ragged rotting cloth and limbs like broken mainsails.

Ursula seduces the narrator’s family, and he is the only one who recognizes her as a monster. His sole hope lies at the end of the lane, where the powerful good-hearted Hempstocks live — 11-year-old Lettie, her mother and grandmother — on a farm that is a portal to other worlds.

The narrator is frightened, as you would expect, but he has been frightened his whole life; he sleeps with the door open and the hallway light on. He has been alone, too; no one comes to his seventh birthday party. We all know the vulnerability of childhood, when terrors lurked in the dark and bossy, moody adults judged our every move like impossible gods. This novel is at its most powerful and frightening when it exaggerates that defenselessness, as when the father kicks down the door of the bathroom, fills the tub with cold water and shoves his disobedient boy beneath the surface while Ursula observes them with her rotting-cloth eyes. “People kept pulling their faces off to reveal new faces beneath,” the narrator observes of the adults in his life.

He finds consolation in books, in adventures and fantasies. They offer him the cues and answers the human world cannot. Lewis Carroll is quoted more than once, appropriate given Gaiman’s Mad Hatter imagination and the novel’s rabbit hole imaginings. “They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.”

Gaiman has said much the same in interviews, and it’s interesting to consider how he and other fantasy writers have inherited and revised the genre. Anyone attracted to fairy tales and fables should check out the stories and criticism of Kate Bernheimer. I’ll bastardize some of her thoughts here by saying that the fairy tale normalizes magic. If a baby turns into a pig or a wolf speaks in a pleasing baritone or a star descends from the sky and changes into an elderly woman with three wishes to spare, the characters do not question the illogic of the circumstances but freely accept that the surreal is real.

Rarely does someone say, “This can’t be happening,” in a Karen Russell story, a Kevin Brockmeier story, an Aimee Bender or Matt Bell story. Because Gaiman’s adult narrator is unreliable — he admits to chasms in his memory — and because he is describing his adventures as a fanciful 7-year-old who spends his days lost in books, the reader can effortlessly accept the extraordinary made ordinary. Whether it is real, or the wild dreams of childhood, doesn’t matter so much. Because to a child the jungle gym is a pirate ship, the shadow in the closet is a monster, the pennies in the belly of the piggy bank are gold. Imagination is reality.

As a writer, there are two ways you can go about this. Give in to whimsy. Let the imagination run free. Werewolves attend boarding school (as in Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”); a black obelisk descends on Earth (Brockmeier’s “Ceiling”).

Alternately, you can try to persuade the reader that magic is perfectly reasonable. Patrick Rothfuss, whose fantasy novels rival those of George R. R. Martin, spends a great deal of time explaining his magic system. There is an almost slippery science behind the spells and potions, so convincingly described the reader feels enchantment within reach.

I wondered about this — whimsy versus logic — when reading Gaiman. It feels rather curmudgeonly to say, but I’m not sure you can have it both ways. Gaiman talks about “Dark Matter, the material of the universe that makes up everything that must be there but we cannot find,” and riffs his way into a kind of quantum physics school of magic. This aligns nicely with the Hempstocks’ ability to snip out pieces of time, channel energy, remember the Big Bang. But then something more whimsical will pop up, as when a character mentions that Cousin Japeth “went off to fight in the Mouse Wars.” That sort of silliness feels like a slight to the more substantial world-­building Gaiman has achieved.

Though marketed to adults, this book would be equally at home on a young adult bookshelf. Aside from one scene of sex (described abstractly and confusedly through the eyes of a 7-year-old), it feels like a family-friendly nightmare, its tenor akin to that of Gaiman’s Newbery-­winning “Graveyard Book.” The two novels are close cousins in other ways as well. A young boy faces horror and finds himself expelled from his family, alone and insecure. He befriends a girl who grants him access to another world. He finds sanctuary in a supernatural family. He flirts with supernatural powers that aren’t fully reachable to them. And in the end, as the protagonists grow into men, they lose their ability to access the extraordinary.

This is not a reductive summary — each novel is a distinct treasure — but an effort to highlight a preoccupation: Gaiman is especially accomplished in navigating the cruel, uncertain dreamscape of childhood.

There is a moment, toward the end of this novel, when the narrator drops into the duck pond (or ocean, as the Hempstocks call it), and his mind melts and achieves a kind of transcendent understanding: “I saw the world I had walked since my birth and I understood how fragile it was, that the reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger.”

Which replicates the experience I have whenever reading one of Gaiman’s books. His mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown.

Benjamin Percy’s new novel, “Red Moon,” was published in May.

A version of this review appears in print on June 30, 2013, on page BR14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: It All Floods Back.

The wrong mother (2008) by Sophie Hannah

Sally Thorning is watching the news with her husband when she hears an unexpected name-Mark Bretherick. It's a name she shouldn't know, but last year Sally treated herself to a secret vacation-away from her hectic family life-and met a man. After their brief affair, the two planned to never meet again. But now, Mark's wife and daughter are dead-and the safety of Sally's own family is in doubt. Sophie Hannah established herself as a new master of psychological suspense with her previous novel, Little Face. Now with accomplished prose and a plot guaranteed to keep readers guessing, The Wrong Mother is Hannah's most captivating work yet.


Thanks to Goodreads for this synopsis.

All my puny sorrows (2014 ) by Miriam Toews

In Miriam Toews’s brilliant and desperately sad new novel, All My Puny Sorrows, we meet two sisters. One is our narrator, Yolandi, a moderately successful author of rodeo-themed young adult novels. The other is Elfrieda, or Elf, a world-class concert pianist known for her Rachmaninoff, in much demand in the capitals of Europe. Yolandi lives in Toronto; Elfrieda lives in Winnipeg. Yolandi has two children; Elfrieda has none. Yolandi lives a happy enough life, though she’s down on herself for sleeping around, for not being as career-driven as she might be. Elfrieda wants to die so desperately that, at one point in the novel, she cuts her wrists and drinks bleach.

AMPS, as Elfrieda abbreviates the Coleridge line that lends the novel its title, has been called a book about suicide. And fair enough: it is a book about suicide, and, as must be noted, a book drawn from suicides in Toews’s own life – those of her father and her sister. But it’s actually a book about what it is to be a sibling, and particularly about what it is to be a sibling to only one other sibling. It is one of the most moving and accurate representations of that complicated situation I have ever read.

That relationship is the smallest, most intense unit of family – there is none closer, even when it’s bad, partly because there is no relationship with less clearly defined parameters. There’s no parental responsibility, no filial obligation. You just are, alongside that other person. Even as you grow up and grow apart, you are connected by what you shared.

That’s the nature of siblinghood: it’s formed in the crucible of childhood; even as adults, childhood remains its grammar, the common language that continues to shape it. But what happens when that bond matures into adulthood? Often, it softens and blurs into nostalgia.

Throughout AMPS, we are reminded that childhood was an ideal (and idealized) state – “I remember perfectly – or should I say I have a perfect memory,” Yolandi relates, highlighting how we reshape our past – and that that ideal state has been degraded: “There was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine,” she offers, “and … now I woke up every morning reminding myself that control was an illusion.”

In a way, it was a better time: Elfrieda’s mental illness, the internal churning that seeks to destroy her, wasn’t present, or at least as pronounced. In adulthood, the whole world has backslid: “I saw an orderly who had once been the lead singer of a local punk band,” Yolandi notes. “He was stacking trays and whistling next to a poster that listed the symptoms of Flesh Eating Disease.”

Part of that erosion is the awareness of life’s fundamental despair. “Did Elf have a terminal illness?,” Yolandi wonders. “Was she cursed genetically from day one to want to die? Was every seemingly happy moment from her past, every smile, every song, every heartfelt hug and laugh and exuberant fist-pump and triumph, just a temporary detour from her innate longing for release and oblivion?”

All of which sounds rather grim, when you spell it out. But it isn’t, because this is a Miriam Toews novel, which are always delicate braids of sadness and humour. In this sense, and all others, for that matter, AMPS is her most accomplished novel yet.

It’s funny – often really funny. Thus the Mennonite community’s disapproval of Yolandi and Elfrieda’s mother’s choice to become a social worker and turn her home into an office brings “a steady stream of sad and angry Mennonites came to our house, usually in secret because therapy was seen as lower even than bestiality because at least bestiality is somewhat understandable in isolated farming communities.”

At a memorial service, a toddler opens the urn containing the deceased and snacks on some ashes; late in the novel, Yolandi compares living with her mother to living with Winnie the Pooh.

But even in the many moments of lightness, there is a dangerous undercurrent of sadness. At one point Yoli buys “Vaseline Intensive Care lotion, which had recently been renamed Vaseline Intensive Rescue lotion by the company to reflect the emergency atmosphere of current life on earth.”

Sadness is the book’s currency. And not just the sadness embodied in Elfrieda. Yolandi suggests that sadness such as hers lives within us all, a shared consciousness of sorts.

When her mother asks her why the teenage heroines in her rodeo novels are all so sad, if their struggles are because Yoli has so much sadness in her, she has a simple answer: “no, no, everyone has all that sadness in them.”

And that is the book’s great gift: its reminder that feeling such things is normal. In a world where everyone has that sorrow in them – which is to say, a world like ours – we find permission to embrace that sadness, rather than a rallying cry to escape it. And we witness the possibility of making a life that can accommodate incredible intimacy without denying the fundamental bleakness of existence.

At one point early in the novel, Yolandi recalls asking her sister, when they were young, “what’s so hot about playing the piano?” Elfrieda offers an argument for how to structure a performance for maximum efficacy, but it’s just as easily read as a roadmap for the success of All My Puny Sorrows:

“She told me that the most important thing was to establish the tenderness right off the bat, or at least close to the top of the piece, just a hint of it, a whisper, but a deep whisper because the tension will mount, the excitement and drama will build – I was writing it down as fast as I could – and when the action rises the audience might remember the earlier moment of tenderness, and remembering will make them long to return to infancy, to safety, to pure love, then you might move away from that, put the violence and agony of life into every note, building, building still, until there is an important decision to make: return to tenderness, even briefly, glancingly, or continue on with the truth, the violence, the pain, the tragedy, to the very end.”

AMPS proves that that final, important decision is not much of a decision at all. There is no need to choose relief over violence, or love over pain. In this devastating novel – as in life itself – tenderness and tragedy are, like siblings, forever bound.

Thanks to Jared Bland, editor of Globe Arts and Globe Books, for this excellent review. Apr 18, 2014.

The sleeping and the dead (2001) by Ann Cleeves

Thanks to author's website anncleeves.com.


In this vivid psychological suspense novel, a diving instructor makes a gruesome discovery in Cranwell Lake - the body of a teenager who has clearly been in the water for many years.
Detective Peter Porteous is called to the scene. After trailing through the missing persons files, he deduces that the corpse is Michael Grey, an enigmatic and secretive young man who was reported missing by his foster parents in 1972.
As the police investigation gets under way in Cranwell, on the other side of the country prison officer Hannah Morton is about to get the shock of her life. For Michael was her boyfriend, and she was with him the night he disappeared.
The news report that a body has been found brings back dreaded and long buried memories from her past...

Silent mercy (2011 ) by Linda Fairstein

In the latest thriller in Linda Fairstein's bestselling series, Alex Cooper dives deep into the byzantine, sinister world of New York City's powerful religious institutions.

It's the middle of the night. Prosecutor Alexandra Cooper is called to Harlem's Mount Neboh Baptist Church, a beautiful house of worship originally built as a synagogue. But the crowd gathered there isn't interested in architecture, or even prayer. They've come for the same reason Alex has: to find out why the body of a young woman has been decapitated, set on fire, and left burning on the church steps.

The only identifiable artifact on the charred remains is the imprint of a Star of David necklace seared into the victim's flesh. Alex wonders if the fire was meant to destroy this woman's body, or to draw attention to it. Her fears are confirmed days later, when a second corpse is found at a cathedral in Little Italy. The killings look like serial hate crimes, but the apparent differences in the victims' beliefs seem to eliminate a religious motive. Convinced that another young woman is bound to die, Alex mines the depths of Manhattan's many houses of worship to find a connection between the victims-and in the process uncovers a terrible and perilous truth that takes her far beyond the scope of her investigation, and directly into the path of terrible danger.

Thanks to Goodreads for this review.



Three seconds (2010) by Roslund Hellstrom

Three Seconds (translated by Kari Dickson) invites comparison with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. There is the same obsessive detail, the same corruption of the authorities, and even Larsson's tactic of the slow introductory chapters that suddenly shift into a higher gear.

But Roslund and Hellström are very much their own men. A murder in Stockholm appears to be the bloody aftermath of a drug deal gone sour. Ace undercover man Piet Hoffmann has to infiltrate the Polish mafia's drug set-up in a maximum security prison, but finds himself linked to the killing of another operative posing as a dealer.
The first third of the book may be andante but thereafter, the tempo is firmly allegro. R & H have even managed to freight in some cogent aperçus about the nature of identity amid the clammy suspense. Three Seconds is no dumbed-down blockbuster.
So are Roslund and Hellström the new Stieg Larsson? Or has Jo Nesbø already bagged the late writer's crown? It should not matter who is at the top of the Scandinavian crime-fiction tree to anyone except the bean counters at the publishers



Thanks for the following review goes to www.independent.co.uk › Arts + Ents

Raven black ( ) by Ann Cleeves

It is a cold January morning, and Shetland lies buried beneath a deep layer of snow. Trudging home, Fran Hunter's eye is drawn to a splash of colour on the frozen ground, ravens circling above. It is the strangled body of her teenage neighbour, Catherine Ross. As Fran opens her mouth to scream, the ravens continue their deadly dance.
The locals on the quiet island stubbornly focus their gaze on one man - loner and simpleton Magnus Tait. But when detective Jimmy Perez and his colleagues from the mainland insist on opening out the investigation, a veil of suspicion and fear is thrown over the entire community.
For the first time in years, Catherine's neighbours nervously lock their doors, whilst a killer lives on in their midst.
Raven Black was the first winner of the prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award for the best crime novel of the year. The judges praised Raven Black for its "superb sense of place." They called it "a depiction of an enclosed community with modern and entrenched values constantly competing, [and] a thrilling read."

Set in the remote Scottish Shetland Islands, Cleeves's taut, atmospheric thriller, the first in a new series, will keep readers guessing until the last page. Det. Insp. Jimmy Perez investigates the murder of teenage Catherine Ross, found strangled on a snowy hillside shortly after New Year's. While the police and citizens alike are quick to lay the blame on local eccentric Magnus Tait, who was not only the last person to see Catherine alive but also the prime suspect in the disappearance eight years earlier of another girl, Perez has his doubts. He's soon drawn into an intricate web of lies as he unearths the long-buried secrets of everyone from a roguish playboy to Catherine's only school friend.


Cleeves, winner of the CWA's Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award (formerly the Gold Dagger), masterfully paints Perez as an empathetic hero and sprinkles the story with a lively cast of supporting characters who help bring the Shetlands alive. When the shocking identity of the murderer is revealed, readers will be as chilled as the harsh winds that batter the isolated islands.

Publishers' Weekly (starred review)
            © 1997-2005 Reed Business Informat

Thanks to author's website, anncleeves.com

Dead water by Ann Cleeves

Thanks to Ann Cleeves website www.anncleeves.com for the following;

When the body of journalist Jerry Markham is found in a traditional Shetland boat, outside the house of the Fiscal down at the Marina, young Detective Inspector Willow Reeves is draft rom the Hebrides to head up the investigation.

Since the death of his fiancée, Inspector Jimmy Perez has been out the loop, but his interest in this new case is stirred and he decides to help the inquiry - for Willow, his local knowledge is invaluable as the close-knit community holds many secrets. Markham - originally a Shetlander but who had made a name for himself in London - had left the islands years before to pursue his burgeoning writing career. In his wake, he left a scandal involving a young girl, Evie Watt, who is now engaged to a crofter. He had few friends there, so why was he back in Shetland?

Willow and Jimmy are soon led to Sullom Voe, the heart of Shetland's North Sea oil and gas industry. In a community where traditional values are held very dear by some, the advent of new energies, even renewables, is not always welcome. It emerges that Markham was chasing a story in his final days. One that must have been - for someone - significant enough to warrant his death...

"[Ann Cleeves is] in her element in this extraordinary landscape, with its old croft houses and modern oilfields - and water, water everywhere."

New York Times Book Review

Blue lightning by Ann Cleeves

Thank you to Ann Cleeves website for this review.



Detective Jimmy Perez knows it will be a difficult homecoming when he returns to Fair Isle to introduce his fiancée, Fran, to his parents. It's a community where everyone knows each other, and strangers, while welcomed, are still viewed with a degree of mistrust.

Challenging to live on at the best of times, with the autumn storms raging, the island feels cut off from the rest of the world. Trapped, tension is high and tempers become frayed.

Enough to drive someone to murder...
When a woman's body is discovered at the renowned Fair Isle bird observatory, with feathers threaded through her hair, the islanders react with fear and anger. With no support from the mainland and only Fran to help him, Jimmy has to investigate the old-fashioned way. He soon realises that this is no crime of passion - but a murder of cold and calculated intention.
With no way off the island until the storms abate, Jimmy knows he has to work quickly. There's a killer on the island just waiting for the opportunity to strike again.
Andrew Taylor, writing in the Spectator, said: "As usual, the plotting is strong and the background fascinating. Cleeves is particularly good at assembling domestic detail that adds a cumulative poignancy and depth to her characters' lives. The narrative builds to a truly shocking climax with a grimly convincing epilogue."
Award-winning crime writer Frances Fyfield said: "This is a real, page turning thriller. It is beautifully crafted, belonging to the golden age of well-fashioned detective fiction. Clues, red herrings, isolation, birds, wings, feathers, unusual passions made understood. I simply could not put it down... a terrific, atmospheric novel."


Blue Lightning was chosen by John Lanchester as one of his (two) books of the year in the Telegraph Review (20.11.2010).
Antonia Fraser, writing in The Lady, was hooked: and having read Blue Lightning went on to read the rest of the quartet - but she recommends reading them in chronological order!

If you are looking for a well-crafted Agatha Christie-type murder mystery with a strong atmosphere, you cannot do better than turn to Ann Cleeves.

Antonia Fraser, The Lady

White nights by Ann Cleeves

It's midsummer in Shetland, the time of the white nights, when birds sing at midnight and the sun never sets.
Artist Bella Sinclair throws a party to launch an exhibition of her work and to introduce the paintings of Fran Hunter. The Herring House, the gallery where the exhibition is held, is on the beach at Biddista, in the remote north west of the island. When a mysterious Englishman bursts into tears and claims not to know who he is or where he's come from, the evening ends in farce. The following day the Englishman is found hanging from a rafter in a boathouse on the jetty, a clown's mask on his face.
Detective Jimmy Perez is convinced that this is a local murder. A second murder Biddista only reinforces this belief. But the detective's relationship with Fran Hunter clouds his judgement. And this is a crazy time of the year when night blurs into day and nothing is quite as it seems.


White Nights was the Saturday Play on Radio 4 on Saturday 2nd July, 2.30 pm, directed by Kirsteen Cameron. and starring Steven Robertson as Jimmy Perez. Ann was particularly pleased with this casting: "This is great news" she said, "because Steven is a Shetlander." The play received a seasonal repeat on the evening of 9th June 2012.

The production also featured music by Shetland fiddler Chris Stout, who collaborated with harpist Catriona McKay to produce a CD aslso called - "White Nights"! Ann Cleeves explains: "It's not a representation of the book, rather a sense of Shetland and Scandanavia in mid-summer. But there is one tune called Roddy Sinclair - the name of a charismatic fiddle player who appears in the book!"
More about White Nights, the album, on Chris Stout's web site.
Find the locations described in White Nights on a map of Shetland, or read a review of White Nights in the Wheredunnit blog, with a focus on the scenes of the crime.
A short video of Ann Cleeves talking about White Nights.


Thanks to Ann Cleeve's website,  www.anncleeves.com

Red Bones by Ann Cleeves

Red Bones, the third instalment of Ann Cleeves' Shetland Quartet, is set in spring: a time of rebirth and celebration. And a time of death... for April is the cruelest month.

Perhaps that's why Red Bones was chosen as the basis for Shetland, a new two-part crime drama set in Scotland and starring Douglas Henshall. A special Shetland preview on November 21st was well received by the local audience, and Ann Cleeves gave it her approval too: "It's great," she said. "It's not faithful to the book but it's faithful to the atmosphere and spirit of the book. It's important that it's a good piece of TV rather than stick rigidly to the book." The transmission date has not yet been announced, but is expected to be some time in January.

When a young archaeologist discovers a set of human remains, the island community is intrigued. Is it an ancient find - or a more contemporary mystery? Then an elderly woman is shot on her land in a tragic accident, and Jimmy Perez is called in by her grandson, his own colleague Sandy Wilson. He finds two feuding families whose envy, greed and bitterness has divided the surrounding community.

With Fran in London, and surrounded by people he doesn't know and a community he has no links with, Jimmy finds himself out of his depth. Then another woman dies, and as the spring weather shrouds the island in claustrophobic mists, the two deaths remain shrouded in mystery.

Red Bones was long-listed for the Impac Dublin Award.

 

"Cleeves pulls out all the stops in this terrific tale."

The Globe and Mail

"...this intelligent mystery..."

The Sunday Times

"Cunning character play and deception play their part in this satisfying tale, bringing about a denouement that turns everything in the plot neatly and bewilderingly on its head."

Gerald Kaufman, The Scotsman

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Telling tales (2000 ) by Ann Cleeves

 

10 years ago Jeanie Long was charged with the murder of 15-year old Abigail Mantel. Now new evidence has proved Jeanie's innocence. But Jeanie commits suicide in her prison cell, unable to face the people who had believed her capable of killing a child. On hearing the news, Emma Bennett is haunted once more by memories of her vibrant best friend, Abigail, and by the thought that her killer is still at large. Now Inspector Vera Stanhope is making fresh enquiries amongst the residents of Elvet, the small East Yorkshire village where Emma and Abigail grew up. Everyone is feeling vulnerable and uneasy, even guilty. And when a second body is found, the investigation takes a frightening new turn...

"A riveting read. Ann Cleeves probes beneath the surface of a community to reveal the darkness that can fester when everyone thinks they know each other's secrets" by Val McDermid

"Cleeves' portrayal of rural life is as far removed from chocolate box as you could hope for. The natural world here is all-powerful, striking rather than pretty and relationships in the community as bitter as the winds that scour the coast. Whether detailing the domestic world, life with a small baby or the work of the pilots on the ships, Cleeves has an accomplished eye. An excellent psychological thriller." by Cath Staincliffe, Tangled Web

Thanks to AnnCleeves.com, the author's website