Book review – Dark Water

“He walked down the hill into the fog. It lay like a pool over the lower ground, swallowing him up, so that he felt as if he were drowning.”

This review contains spoilers for Raven Black and Blue Lightning.

Dark Water begins the second of Cleeves’s two Shetland quartets. The division of the series into two quartets isn’t just a marketing gimmick around titles (the first quartet has titles all about colours, the second about elements). Rather, the arc of the first series ends and now a whole new one begins. Fran Hunter, Perez’s fiancée, has died, and left Perez with custody of her daughter, Cassie. In Dark Water, Perez is on compassionate leave and has gone from calm and curious to broody and depressed, cut off from the world and clinging to his stepdaughter as the only human relationship he has left, experiencing both guilt and grief.

During this time, a journalist called Jerry Markham is murdered. The reader witnesses the moment it happens, so we know that when his body is found in a boat near the procurator fiscal Rhona Laing, that the body has been moved. Markham turns out to be a Shetlander who moved south to write for bigger newspapers, the only son of hoteliers who spoiled him raising him. He left behind an ex-girlfriend, Evie Watts, who had once become pregnant with his child before losing it. The story builds fascinating layers around Markham, who has a seemingly mysterious and unknown relationship with the procurator fiscal which she’s unwilling to divulge. The story also dives into Evie Watts, who has found a new man and is about to be wed, and her parents, who work crafting traditional Shetland boats by hand.

The book has a fantastic atmosphere. We are taken into the world of Shetlandic crafts, and into the contrast of tradition and modernity in Shetland. Shetland is wealthy because of oil, and has other potential energy sources like tidal and wind power. All this contrasts with the traditional image of sheep, crofts and crafts that tourists have of the islands. The characters in the story all have secrets and complex interrelationships, which helps to complicate the story satisfyingly enough to keep the reader guessing the murderer’s identity. It’s hard to figure out what the common thread in the story is, and therefore the reader stays invested in all the relationships and subplots and themes in case they might be relevant.

The atmosphere is improved by the writing. Fogs roll on and off the islands, and the murderer seems to drift around unseen, a primeval ghost of terror. The theme of water is so easy to write about given the archipelagic nature of the Shetland islands. Cleeves augments this by exploring traditional boat-making, having some characters race on water, and explore a tidal power project as well. Water pervades the story, still and unforgiving.

But at the heart of it all is Perez. His grief permeates the story, makes him moody, silent, unpredictable, and yet he never looses that stillness and mystery that makes Perez himself. His is a quiet grief, that makes him unpredictable and uncertain, a rage and guilt nursed within, but finding little expression outside, except in a desire to be left alone and to be close to his stepdaughter. At the same time, Cleeves introduces Willow Reeves, the new inspector from the highlands office, a child of English hippies who moved to the Hebrides. She provides an important counterpoint to Perez, both in driving forward the investigation when Perez is uncooperative or absent, and also in providing an outsider’s perspective on Perez to contrast with Sandy Wilson’s. She is also a woman who intrudes on Perez’s grief, and that disturbs Perez.

After the brutal tragedy of Blue Lightning, Cleeves had to write a new story that plunged into darker depths and gave the loss of Fran true consequences. She achieves this in what may be the darkest novel she’s ever written, in a brooding and unpredictable novel with a thrilling and brilliant mystery. The motive for the murder is a little bit incoherent, but that can largely be forgiven given the novel’s huge strengths. Dark Water is definitely not to be missed.